by Paul Zimmer
PAUL ZIMMER
THE
MYSTERIES
OF
SOLDIERS
GROVE
“Louise and Her Redoubtable Kingdom Come” appeared in a somewhat different format in the Gettysburg Review.
Copyright © 2015 by Paul Zimmer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.
For information, address:
The Permanent Press
4170 Noyac Road
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
www.thepermanentpress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zimmer, Paul.
The mysteries of Soldiers Grove / Paul Zimmer.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-57962-388-3 (hardcover)
eISBN 978-1-57962-412-5
I. Title.
PS3576.I47M97 2015
813'.54—dc23 2014041249
Printed in the United States of America.
This is a work of fiction. I dedicate it to all my beloved family, and to friends, acquaintances, and citizens of Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, near where I have lived for the past twenty-five years. Those that read this will recognize at once that it is a fictive work—that no character in it is based upon any person, living or dead, and no event or place mentioned has any counterpart in reality.
It took me a long time to write this novel, therefore I cannot possibly recollect or thank all the people who helped me in large and small ways over the years to write and finish it. A writer needs good friends, abettors, editors, and publishers. I wish I could name all of you, but I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
So that the retriving of these forgotten Things from Oblivion in some sort resembles the Art of a Conjuror, who makes those walke and appeare that have layen in their graves many hundreds of yeares: and to represent as it were to the eie, the places, Customes and Fashions, that were of old Times.
—John Aubrey’s Brief Lives
CHAPTER 1
Cyril
I’ve given the slip to those officious people in the geezer home across the road, and tiptoed out the emergency exit when they thought I was taking a nap. It’s late Friday afternoon in Soldiers Grove, the workweek is done, and Burkhum’s Tap is filling up with thirsty, wiped-out people. I’ve staked myself out early at the bar, and dunked a few Leinenkugels already.
I’ve been trying to figure how I might tell a life or two to the guy sitting next to me, but I can see he’s a weary man and I’ve learned to be cautious. Sometimes folks get the wrong idea when I start talking at them—like I am trying to put a move on them or something. So ridiculous! It makes me feel low when people misread me like that. It should be obvious to anyone that at my advanced age I couldn’t even make an obscene phone call.
I’ve been a teller of lives and an odd jobs guy all my days, never having had the wit or strength to be a jock or cock or financial rock. Somehow I was lucky enough to discover that my only talent is for remembering the brief lives of famous people, and telling these little tales to other folks makes me feel useful, when I thought for a long time I had nothing to give.
But this is not easy work and lately I’ve been thinking about retirement. Some days I swear if I could locate the place in my brain where all these lives are assembled, I’d tilt my head to the side and drain them out through my ear hole into a bucket; then late one night I’d sneak out of the care home and go to the Soldiers Grove Public Library to funnel the whole thing into the book-drop slot. Our ingenious town librarian would find them in the morning on the floor in an iridescent puddle. This woman especially would know what to do with them. She’d carefully mop the lives up with a clean cloth and wring them into an elegant pitcher. Then, ding, ding, ding, she’d carefully pour them into one of the computers where they would mysteriously disperse, wash around and organize themselves with all the other information in those mysterious places so they can be instantly available to other people.
But then, after this, who would tell the lives? Who would give them the respect and care they need?
What would I do with myself? I’m still serving a purpose, and when I can’t do this, I will be dead. Maybe I’ll just keep them in my head. When I slip away finally—the whole load will just go out with me.
When I was a kid my parents were drunk and screaming at each other all the time. I can’t remember what they said to each other but it was hateful and destructive. The slaughter went on endlessly through my childhood until one summer morning there was a miracle. A canny traveling encyclopedia salesman got his foot in our door when both my mother and father were home and only moderately clobbered. Quickly he sized up our situation. Burrowing into my parents’ guilt, he convinced and shamed them into investing in the whole set of Encyclopaedia Britannica for their “smart little scholar” son.
When the huge load of boxes arrived a few weeks later we had no shelves to put the books on. My parents had forgotten they’d ordered them. So I had the deliveryman stack all the cartons to the left side of the front door. I opened the first box, took out volume one, went up to my room and began reading. Almost immediately I discovered that I liked the biographies best, so I concentrated on them. Devouring these lives, big and small, made the shrill sounds of my parents’ combat fade away as I slowly worked my way through the accounts of famous folks in the big books.
When I became a teenager I saved money from grocery jobs and a paper route to buy my own set of the Encyclopedia Americana in installments. I had these boxes stacked on the right side of the front door as I acquired them, and devoured all the minibiographies in these imposing volumes until I’d finished high school.
The Britannica was my father, and the Americana was my mother—the only family I could count on. I also hung around the drugstore newsstand and scoured magazines, newspapers, and paperbacks for news of current luminaries. Sometimes I’d go to the bookstore in Viroqua or the Soldiers Grove library and hide in the biographical sections to peek in the books.
Without the brief lives I would have become some kind of scumbag. My folks spent all their time communing with spirits in bottles and there were no other more tangible apparitions in our house. I never met any grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews, nieces—that sort of thing. There were a few tatty old photographs in drawers, but no identifying notes on the back.
I never knew why my parents hated each other so completely. Perhaps they felt trapped by my presence. That’s a hell of a way to grow up. When they died, my father just weeks after my mother, I felt only numbness and shame that I had no tears, but I did not know how to feel sadness. Or perhaps I did not recognize the sadness that I felt. Or perhaps I had no sadness. I couldn’t find an address book amongst their belongings, nor any real trace of an extended family in the miserable residue of the house, so I was the only person who attended their services.
After their deaths I thought about leaving Soldiers Grove, but did not know where to go, or how to go. I learned to drink beer (no spirits!) and over the years sometimes attended the local bars. I had a few occasional drinking buddies, but never figured out how to make close friends or talk to women.
While reading all those encyclopedia entries over the years, I put a lot of words into my vocabulary. Because of this some people think I talk funny and it makes them wary of me, but I keep chattering anyway. Sometimes I get a little pissed when I can’t make them understand what I am talking about, but I try not to show this.
When I became elderly and finally couldn’t manage for myself anymore, I took a room in the old fol
ks’ home. But I remain always hungry for lives: politicians, scientists, actors, musicians, scholars, soldiers, rogues, writers, artists, clergy, entertainers, criminals, architects, thinkers, athletes, and other famous people from the past. This is my real work. I want to know how these people got into and out of this world while doing something important enough to be meaningful. It is still my pleasure to collect this vicarious information and I try to share it with others.
I’VE BEEN drinking beer at Burkhum’s bar for at least half an hour, and now decided that I’m going to try and speak to the swarthy guy drinking next to me and give him one of my lives. I snap my fingers and cock my head at him.
“Got it!” I say.
He gives me a wary glimmer, and leans away as I tell him, “I’ve been trying to figure out who you remind me of. At first I was thinking Carmen Basilio, but then—maybe Vincente Minnelli or Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour? Then it hit me for sure—you are a dead ringer for Antonio Vivaldi.”
It’s just after five in the Tap and Burkhum’s is starting to fill up now. According to our town sign posted on the highway, 593 people live in Soldiers Grove, so it is a quiet place. Occasionally over the years the town has been bedeviled by flooding problems, and about thirty years ago the business district and a lot of nice houses took a serious shot, swamped by spring overflowing. It had happened before, so the people decided to move the business section to higher ground and make part of the old residential section into a park. The little grocery, drug store, and farmers’ hardware that were built on higher ground at that time all wasted away a decade or so ago, giving way to a Walmart Supercenter built in Viroqua, the larger market town twenty miles up the highway.
But still, in Soldiers Grove there’s a Mobil station, a small motel/restaurant, a pharmacy, a very classy little library, post office, repair garage, Burkhum’s Tap, and an American Legion Post with a World War II tank mounted in front, its cannon pointed across the highway at the nursing home where I live now.
I’ve grown old and require assisted living. I never knew how to have a girlfriend, never married nor had the courage to risk living with someone after witnessing the years of my parents’ carnage. I just worked jobs in town and spent my spare time collecting brief lives. I know it’s an odd calling. But this is what I’ve got.
The guy beside me in the Tap is wearing spattered bib overalls and a grimy Milwaukee Brewers cap. He’s in the bar for a quick drink before heading home to his family and a washup after a hard week. He has puffy cheeks like Vivaldi’s.
“You look Italian,” I say to him. “Not too many Romans in Soldiers Grove.” He won’t look at me and doesn’t chuckle at my little joke. I suppose he’s heard of my reputation as a chatterbox.
But I am going to get something done. I’ve ducked out on those fussy folks in the nursing home, and now I’m on my fourth Leinenkugel. Every couple weeks or so I make a break for it and cut myself this slack. Otherwise I’d go bonkers, locked up with all those geriatrics. I’ve gone through three roommates, trying to tell them some of my lives. The last one attempted suicide, so now they’ve assigned me permanently to a private room.
I speak loudly to my neighbor in the Tap so he can hear me over the omnipresent television set mounted above the bar. Other patrons cast a wary eye at me.
“Antonio Vivaldi was a late seventeenth-century Italian composer, and lived halfway into the eighteenth,” I say. The guy beside me is looking panicky, so I hurry on before he can bolt: “You may know his composition, Four Seasons. Probably you’ve heard it on an elevator in Madison or somewhere—but Vivaldi composed a lot of other great stuff, too: concertos, a bunch of oratorios, more than ninety operas. He wrote pieces for lute and viola da gamba and pianoforte, chorales—even songs for solo voice. He made his living teaching music in a fancy school for orphan girls. He was an ordained priest, but he was always sniffing around the young ladies and sometimes the prefects had to send him away to cool off.”
I give these little twists in my biographies sometimes to give them a snap that folks in Soldiers Grove might relate to.
“Oh . . . yeah?” the guy says to me out of the side of his mouth. He still hasn’t looked at me.
“What’s your name?” I ask. “Mine’s Cyril.” I stick my hand out for a shake.
He’s slow to respond, but at last he says, “Vern,” and holds out some limp fingers for me to grasp.
“Well, Vern, let me tell you a little more that might surprise you: Vivaldi apparently had some influence on Johann Sebastian Bach. They lived around the same time, and scholars have found transcriptions of Vivaldi’s music in Bach’s hand. They never met, but it seems like Bach might have taken some leads from Vivaldi. Bach wrote a lot of music, and he was a raunchy guy, too, but he wasn’t hung up being a priest like Vivaldi, so he had twenty-two kids.”
Vern finally gives me a quick flash, to make sure I don’t seem too dangerous, then he swishes his drink around and drains it to the cubes. It looks like a double Jack Daniel’s. That was my father’s drink—starting around eight in the morning.
“Vivaldi was a grouchy guy, too,” I hurry on, “he was always stewing about things. Maybe his chastity made him irritable. He used to pack a knife in his cloak, and if anyone messed with him on the street in Venice, he’d back them off fast.” I’m pumping this part up too, trying to make things interesting for Vern, but I see he’s trying to signal Burkhum for his tab.
“I got to go see to my milking,” he explains from the side of his mouth.
I hurry on, “One time Vivaldi sliced up a gondolier for shortchanging him, but they let him off without a charge because he was in the middle of composing an oratorio for the king. In those days governments gave you a little credit for being artistic.”
Burkhum comes over—but before Vern can ask for his bill, I say, “Hey, Burkhum, give me another Leinie, and I’d like to buy Vern here another of whatever he’s drinking.” Vern relaxes just a little now. Double mixed drinks cost four big ones in the Tap, and Burkhum puts out big plastic bowls of fresh popcorn on Friday nights.
“Maybe you don’t favor music, Vern,” I say. “I see you’re wearing a Brewers hat. How about a little baseball? You know you look a little like Cookie Lavagetto, too.” Vern is starting to look uneasy again. Burkhum brings our drinks and Vern takes a big pull on his double, but doesn’t thank me. I go on talking.
“Cookie came up with the Pirates in 1934, and then was traded to Brooklyn in ’37. He became the Dodgers’ regular third baseman in ’39 and hit .300. But in a few years he got drafted for the war and didn’t get back to baseball until ’46. Mostly he warmed the bench for the Dodgers then because they had Spider Jorgensen playing third. In the ’47 World Series against the Yankees, in the fourth game, Bill Bevens is tossing a no-hitter in the ninth, but he walks the first two guys. The Dodgers decide to put Cookie in to pinch hit, and he smacks a double off the right field wall to ruin Bevens’s no-hitter and beat the Yankees 2-1. Cookie is king of Brooklyn.
“How did the Dodgers thank Lavagetto for this? They released him the next season. He’d given them everything he had. Baseball’s like Russian communism. You get the red star one day, and you disappear the next.”
Vern seems a little more interested in this biography, but he is still leaning away like he’s expecting me to explode at any minute.
“Hey, Vern,” I say. “Am I boring you? That’s all I know about Cookie Lavagetto and Antonio Vivaldi. Would you like to know what I know about Alfred Sisley or Buck Clayton? Harold Stassen? Cagliostro? Bucky Pizzarelli? Sara Teasdale? Saint James the Greater? Amelita Galli-Curci? How about Sonny Tufts? Sister Kenny? Maybe you like those Italians. Cosimo de Medici? Boom Boom Mancini? Johnny Antonelli? Amedeo Modigliani?”
But Vern is gone. He knocks his glass over making his break and spills ice cubes down the bar. Everyone’s looking at me, and I feel like a backhoe on a wet clay tennis court. What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I go on gassing like this? Why can’t I just stay in my room
and keep my trap shut?
Because I have all this stuff in my head—I’ve got to let some of it out once in a while or I’ll explode. I mean, what the hell! I am keeper of the lives! That’s important. This is my work, but I’m like a guy who mucks out barns for a living. People stand clear of me.
Burkhum brings me the bill. “Bring me another Leinie, please,” I say.
“That’s enough today, Cyril,” Burkhum says. “The nurses are going to be in here looking for you in a minute, and they’re going to give me holy hell as it is.”
“Well, I don’t want to be a problem for you.” I pay my tab. “Say, Burkhum, did anyone ever tell you, you look like Sinclair Lewis?” Burkhum quick steps away.
Just as I’m fixing to put on my stocking cap and leave the Tap, a guy I know from the nursing home comes in the door. His name is Nobleson. He lives in the “self-sufficient” section and can take a powder anytime he wants. He doesn’t have to sneak out like I do. Nobleson checks out the crowd and sees me waving to him. He hesitates, but then slowly heads over because he knows I’ve got dough and will buy him a drink.
“Nobleson,” I greet him. “How’re you, buddy boy? Sit down here for a minute. What are you drinking? You know, when you were walking over here I was thinking to myself that you look like Arthur Godfrey.”
Nobleson knows the course, so he steers me in a direction he favors more. “Not me,” he says. “You’re thinking about somebody else. But I’ve always been told that I look a lot like a young Van Johnson.”
“Now there’s a guy!” I say to Nobleson.
Burkhum has approached us. “Double Old Crow on ice,” Nobleson tells him.
“And give me another Leinie,” I say.
“Crow coming up,” says Burkhum, “but no Leinie for you, Cyril. You need a nap.”
Burkhum is sometimes an obscenity. “Burkhum,” I say to him, “you remind me of George Jeffreys. You know who he was?”