by Neil Plakcy
“Don’t they have head hunters in Borneo?” Charley asked.
“Go on,” Jenny said, poking Tom in the stomach. “You were interested.”
“Why didn’t you go?” Connie said. “I’d give anything to be able to go someplace exotic. Someplace far away from Stewart’s Crossing.”
Jenny looked at Charley, but he looked away. “Tom got the job at the plant,” Jenny said. Tom was a junior executive in the marketing department of a big chemical company out on the highway. “And I got the job with the Senator, and you all were here, and we just decided we’d stay.”
“I’m glad you did,” Connie said. “In hard times, it’s good to have your family around.”
Charley got up and walked into the kitchen. His mother had set out cocoa powder, sugar and milk, and a kettle of water was steaming on the stove. But instead of bustling around as she usually did, she was sitting at the Formica-topped table, holding a tissue. Her cheeks were slick with tears.
“Mom, what’s the matter?” Charley asked. He sat down next to her and took her hand.
Mrs. Woodruff smiled faintly. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “It’s nothing. It’s just…” She hesitated.
“What?”
“I thought I’d use the blue mugs for the hot chocolate,” she said. “But they’re gone. I guess we sold them today.”
“It’s all right, Mom. I know, this is going to take getting used to. But you’ll get accustomed to it.”
“I thought I’d sell all the things your father used,” she said. “That seeing them every day would only remind me, make me feel bad. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Come on,” Charley said, standing up. “Let’s make this cocoa.”
* * *
The day before the closing on the farm, Charley stopped by Sandy Lord’s office on his way home from the furniture factory. “Don’t worry so much,” Sandy said. “You’re getting a good deal. This developer’s taking a big risk that people will want to live in suburban houses so far outside of town.”
“It’s pretty scary, having to be the father,” Charley said. “How did my dad manage it, all those years?” He paced over to the window, then turned back to Sandy. “Even when Raymond was born, and I was standing at the hospital looking down at him, proud—but scared, too—I knew my dad was there to fall back on. But now, I’m on my own.”
“You have been all along. You just haven’t realized it until now.” Sandy sat back in his chair. “I lost my father while I was in law school,” he said. “He had cancer, and he was gone a couple of months after they found it. And all that time he was sick, I never thought to ask him what I was going to do without him. At first, when he was gone, I thought that if I just shouted loud enough, he’d hear me, up in heaven. But then I realized there was nothing I couldn’t figure out on my own, if I just thought about it the way he would have.”
Charley turned back to the window.
“That’s something you’ll have to learn for yourself,” Sandy continued. “But just remember, for generations our fathers have been dying and leaving us, and we’ve been going on.”
Sandy stood up and walked over to the window with Charley. They looked down to Main Street together, and saw two little boys chasing each other around the big iron bell outside the firehouse. Neither one was winning. Charley smiled. “Remember that prank we pulled last year?”
Sandy laughed. “We stole an outhouse in the middle of the night and left it at the town hall,” he said. “How could I forget?”
“Afterwards I told my Dad that it was me, that it was the guys in our Stock Club that did it, that I was in it. You should have heard him holler. Said I had no respect for other people’s property. Said it was a good thing for me that I was bigger than him, or he’d tan my britches.”
“He was probably just jealous,” Sandy said. “Man, that was fun, wasn’t it?”
Charley nodded. “Let’s do it again,” he said. “There was an outhouse behind the farm. We could take that one.”
“Those fancy new places certainly won’t need an outhouse,” Sandy said.
* * *
The next afternoon, just before the closing, Charley drove out to the farmhouse. The mover had been there all morning, picking up his mother’s furniture and boxes, and by the time he arrived the place was nearly empty, except for a suitcase and a couple of boxes in the living room. His mother was standing by the back window, staring out at the fields.
It was one of the few times he could recall seeing her without an apron over her dress. It was sad to think she’d kept that dress safe for years for a moment like this. “Ready for your new life?” Charley asked.
“Not much to it,” his mother said. “At least out here, I had the house to keep up, and your father to look after. That new place is so small I can clean it without blinking.”
“I wish Connie’s life was so easy,” Charley said. “She’s tired all the time.” He looked at his mother, remembering the sweetened French toast she made for special breakfasts, how she had sat lovingly next to him at the piano during those brief years when he had lessons, holding his fingers and helping him strike the keys. “You know, Connie’s got so much to do, taking care of Raymond,” he said. “Now that you’ll be closer to us, maybe you could help her out.”
Mrs. Woodruff smiled. “A little baby in the house again,” she said. “That could almost make that new place seem like a home. I’d love to, Charley. She could bring him over in the morning, and I’d feed him lunch, and she could have a few hours off. I know that’s important to a new mother.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Charley said. He smiled, and his mother smiled back. Charley felt a warmth running between them, something that recharged him. He walked over and hugged her.
“I’m your mother, Charley,” she said. “I want to help you.”
Mrs. Woodruff went out to her car, and Charley walked through the empty rooms of the farmhouse one last time. The house seemed so much smaller without its furniture, without a family living in it. He stopped at the doorway to his old bedroom. He remembered how he had been afraid of thunder when he was a boy, and how he’d hide in the closet whenever there was a big storm.
No more hiding, he thought, as he turned to go back downstairs. You had to face the storms, and either you beat them, and you went on, or they beat you. He wondered how much longer his father could have kept things going. Another bad year and he’d have been turning the place over to the bank. It was getting too hard to run a small family farm. Most of the money you made went to pay off the mortgage and the loans for the equipment. It seemed like the farmer spent most of his day earning money to pay the banker.
Just before he walked out he turned back and looked at the house. The living room, with the staircase going up. The dining room, and just beyond it the kitchen. The house looked old and tired. It deserved a rest.
Charley locked the door behind him.
* * *
It was a simple matter to call the men of the Stock Club together again. By Mischief Night they were prepared, with heavy gloves, a couple of cans of disinfectant spray, and some old rags to cushion the sides of Chuck Ritter’s truck. On the way there, they traded a few jokes about Lyndon Johnson and his dogs, and drained a couple of six-packs, too, for encouragement and liquid refreshment.
There were no streetlights that far outside of town, and the farmhouse itself was dark. Charley led the way out behind the house, alongside the empty field, to where the outhouse stood at the back corner of the Woodruffs’ property. For the first time since his father’s death, he felt like he knew what he was doing.
Nobody had used the old outhouse for years, not since they’d had modern plumbing installed when Charley was a baby. It was a solid wood building, about seven feet tall, showing remarkably little wear. It had a tar-paper roof and a swinging door with a rusty latch. It was nailed securely to fir sills, and it had to be pried off its foundation with a crowbar. Once removed, it was lightweight and easy to move. It had been so long sinc
e it was used, the pit hardly smelled at all, just a faint fragrance like leaves on a compost pile.
They tilted the outhouse and put three men on each side, with Charley leading the way. As the men carried it they heard the lid of the seat flapping with every bump.
On the way from the farm into town, Charley sat on the top of the cab, his legs braced against the outhouse, holding a can of beer and singing at the top of his lungs with the rest of the men. The only song everyone seemed to know was “God Bless America.”
Chuck pulled over just outside the town limits. He stuck his head out the window and said, “You guys just want to pull up in front of the police station and ask them to arrest us?”
Everybody looked chastened. “Hell, it used to be my Dad’s outhouse,” Charley said.
“And if he were still alive you’d never have taken it,” Paul said. He caught himself. “Geez, I’m sorry, Charley.”
“No, you’re right,” Charley said. “My Dad was always the boss. I never directly disobeyed him, though I did things he didn’t approve of. But he’s gone now. And I say we get this sucker going into town.”
The other guys cheered. “Where to?” Chuck asked.
“The bank held a mortgage on pretty near everything my dad owned,” Charley said. “If we hadn’t been able to sell so quick, they’d have taken the whole place, lock, stock and outhouse. So what do you say we give them a taste of what they might have had?”
* * *
The outhouse fit snugly into the doorway of the bank, under the carved Georgian lintel, beneath the bank’s name, spelled out in squared Romanesque letters. A photo even made the late edition of the newspaper. Charley put the picture away inside his toolbox, an old wooden one his father had used for fifty years, one that now held Charley’s favorite and best tools.
Sandy: 1966
During the summer, the inner door to the Home Style coffee shop in Stewart’s Crossing was left open, just the wood-framed screen separating the patrons at the counter and at the half-dozen tables from the activity of Main Street. But now, in late September, the door was pulled closed and had swelled into its frame, so Sandy Lord had to push hard to get it open.
He sat down at one of the tables, smoothed the red-and-white check vinyl tablecloth, and pushed aside the cloudy glass vase with its plastic flowers so that he could open his newspaper. When the waitress came by, he ordered a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich and a Coke.
The paper was full of depressing news, as usual. Up at Harvard, a professor named Timothy Leary had been suspended for advocating the use of illegal drugs like LSD, peyote and marijuana. A flood in Florence, Italy, had damaged millions of dollars worth of art, books and museum collections. All over the country, people were protesting the escalation of the war in Vietnam.
He shook his head. Even the book he was reading at home, In Cold Blood, by a young author named Truman Capote, was about a senseless crime out in the Midwest. It was a terrible world.
“This seat taken?” Sandy looked up to see Nick Miller towering over him. Because of his height, nearly six foot four, Nick made any room seem small.
“No, have a seat,” Sandy said. “I just ordered.”
Nick ran a small insurance agency in town, and had been a friend of Sandy’s for a few years, since their wives had convinced them to join a group of other couples in a stock club. Nick called his order out to the waitress and then turned back to Sandy. “It’s nice now and then to eat in a place where you don’t need a menu. I don’t think they’ve changed anything in this coffee shop since I was a kid.”
“The world is changing, though.” Sandy folded up his paper. “Someday Stewart’s Crossing is bound to catch up.”
“Be a good thing,” Nick said. “This town was a dump when I was a kid. A place farmers came to once a week on a Saturday night. People in Trenton used to drive through, gawking, like we were the real back woods. I hated it.”
“Why didn’t you leave, then?”
“And go where? I had two years at Rider College when I got fed up. I wasn’t cut out for schoolwork. I thought I’d try my hand at selling insurance, and if you want to sell something, it’s best if you try and sell to people you know, at least for starters. They take pity on you.”
The waitress brought their sandwiches. “Then I decided to open my own agency, and I didn’t want to give up all my local clients. But I’ll tell you, though, if I could get out of this town I would.”
“I like Stewart’s Crossing,” Sandy said, between bites of his grilled cheese. “It’s pretty. History all around, lots of good people.”
Nick shrugged. “Sign you up for the Chamber of Commerce.”
Sandy smiled. “Too busy already. Got to save some time for my kids.” He swallowed the last of his sandwich, and washed it down with soda. “You’ll be at the Stock Club meeting next week, won’t you?” He stood up and pulled some money out of his wallet.
“Unless I find a way out of it before then.”
* * *
Sandy’s old friend Arthur Winston called that afternoon, and they were still on the phone when Sandy’s secretary, Lois, interrupted to say that the Laroquettes were there for their appointment. “Ask them to have a seat,” Sandy said, covering the mouthpiece. “I’ll be with them in a minute.”
He turned back to the phone. “It’s a terrific offer, Artie,” he said. “To step in as a partner in a national firm. That’s a big leap from being a sole practitioner in a small town.”
“Like I said, Sandy, the firm wants to expand its presence here in Pittsburgh. To do that, we need experienced lawyers. You have the advantage in that you’ve already passed the Pennsylvania bar.”
“You understand, I’ll have to think it over.”
“Take all the time you need,” Artie said. “Just let me know in a week.”
“Will do. Listen, Art, can you put this in writing?”
“A good lawyer puts everything in writing.”
“Professor Bruckstein, Civil Law 102,” Sandy said.
“I’ll get a letter out to you this afternoon confirming everything. The partnership, the salary, moving expenses, the whole nine yards.”
“Now that was Professor Mcdowell, Introduction to Torts,” Sandy said. “He used that expression at least once every class.”
“It’ll be good to work with you again, Sandy.”
They said good-bye and hung up, but before Sandy buzzed Lois to send the Laroquettes in, he sat back in his oak chair and looked out the window at Main Street. He had come to Stewart’s Crossing in 1955, after a year clerking with a judge in the Circuit Court in Philadelphia. Helene’s family was from Trenton, and she wanted to live near them. Since Sandy had already passed the Pennsylvania bar, it made sense to stick to the west side of the Delaware.
They’d been married barely a year, and Helene was already pregnant with Tommy. He’d hung up his shingle in an office above the bank, and soon he was handling a steady stream of real estate closings, civil suits, divorces and wills.
The town had been good to him, and he’d paid it back. He served on the School Board and the Library Committee, and he’d been a scout leader and a Little League coach. And for the last three years, he and the other men from the Stock Club, including Tom Laroquette in the waiting room, had stolen an outhouse from a farm out in the countryside on the night before Halloween, and left it somewhere in town.
That brought him back to the present with a start. He stood and opened the door to Tom and Jenny, his pretty brown-haired wife, who was carrying their baby boy. “What a cute little devil,” Sandy said, peering down at the baby, who was napping. “How old is he?”
“Two months,” Jenny said.
Sandy ushered them to seats and returned to the far side of the desk. “He’s why we’re here,” Tom said. He looked at Jenny. “Now that we’ve got a child, we figured it was time we started acting like grown-ups, got ourselves life insurance and wills. We’ve already been to see Nick Miller and he fixed us both up with policies
.”
“So you’re into the gloom and doom,” Sandy said. “Well, making a will is pretty simple. Let me show you the standard forms and then we can talk about any changes you want.”
It took almost an hour to spell out what would happen to the house, the bank accounts, the shares in the Stock Club, and a trust from Jenny’s grandmother. When they were finished, Sandy walked Tom and Jenny to the office door, and said good-bye.
He turned back to Lois. “Let’s close up early today. It’s almost four-thirty, and I’ve got some things to talk over with Helene. We can work on the Laroquette wills tomorrow.”
“But what if someone calls, Mr. Lord?”
“Then they’ll call again in the morning.”
Lois sat primly at her desk. “If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Lord, I’ll wait here until five o’clock. I wouldn’t want you to miss an important call.”
Sandy smiled. “That’s good of you.” He picked up his jacket and his briefcase and walked out. “See you tomorrow.”
Helene kept the books for the lumber yard in the center of town, and worked from eight to three so that she could be home when the kids got out of school. When Sandy pulled up in his driveway a few minutes later, she was in the garden, spreading mulch around the roots of the rose bushes they had put in that spring. It was cool and sunny and the sky was a deep blue, with hardly a cloud overhead.
“You’re home early,” Helene said. She was wearing green oilcloth gloves decorated with flowers and when she wiped a hair away from her forehead she left a small dirty smudge behind.
Sandy leaned down and kissed her. “Don’t let me stop you,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I’ll change and help you.”
A few minutes later he was kneeling by her side, wearing a pair of disreputable overalls and a plaid shirt. “You always look like such a farmer in that outfit,” Helene laughed.
“And what are we doing here, if not farming? Hand me some of that mulch.”