Dead End in Norvelt (3 page)

“Miss Volker,” I asked quietly, trying to be ridiculously calm like when doctors talk to insane people in the movies. I didn’t want her to snap and try and kill me like some psychotic lunatic. “You do realize that you are cooking your hands down in that big pot?”

“Of … course … I … do … dear,” she sputtered, and bit down on her lip and hissed as if her words were driven by steam. “Now … please … turn … it … off.”

I sprang out of my chair and twisted the knob on the stove and the flames doubled in size.

“Jeez Louise!” she shouted crossly. “I said
off
!”

“Whoops, sorry,” I apologized, and quickly turned the knob the other way.

“Agrhhh!” she cried out. “I think I may have really melted them this time.”

She lifted her hands out of the pot and they
were
melting. Lumps of glowing yellow flesh oozed down her forearms and spattered onto the floor.

“Oh mercy!” I cried, and fidgeted up and down like a terrified squirrel. “Miss Volker, what have you done to yourself?”

“Turn the cold water on over the sink!” she ordered. “I think I may have done permanent damage.”

I nearly flew to the sink and turned the spigot handle. “Give me your hands,” I said. “Quick.”

She stumbled toward me, then held out the sagging stumps of her melted arms. I hesitated, but there was nothing else to do except run away screaming, so I grabbed what I thought were her wrists. Oh cheeze! The warm, lifeless flesh squished between my fingers as I tugged her forward and held her ruined hands under the water.

She stamped the floor and groaned in horsey agony as her eyes rolled back into her head.

“You’ll be fine,” I jabbered about five jittery times in a row, and each time my mind echoed back, “You won’t be fine … you won’t ever be fine because you
just melted your hands off
!”

“Ahhh,” she sighed with a relaxed shudder, and after a moment her eyes leveled out. “That feels better,” she said calmly. “Now turn off the water.”

I did and she held her arms up. “Now peel it off,” she ordered.

“Peel what off?” I asked.

“The sticky stuff on my arms,” she said impatiently, and then she held a rounded stump up to her mouth, bit off a cooked chunk, and spit it into the trash.

I felt faint. I staggered back a few steps and by then my nose was spewing like an elephant bathing himself. “Please … Miss Volker,” I said with my voice quavering. “Please don’t eat your own flesh.” Oh cheeze-us-crust. Mom didn’t know Miss Volker had gone insane, and I knew I would go insane too if I had to watch her cannibalize her own body down to the white boiled bones.

“You’re bleeding all over the floor,” she said, turning her attention toward me as if she wanted to wash her flesh meal down with my blood. “Let me have a look at you.” Then she reached toward me with her deformed stumps and touched my face and at that moment I yelped out loud and dropped over dead.

*   *   *

When I came to I was alive and stretched out on Miss Volker’s kitchen floor. I was covered with blood but I didn’t know if it was nose blood or blood from after she started eating me. I lifted my head and turned it left and right to check if she had eaten through my neck. I was fine but she was standing above me and pulling long, rotten strips of flesh off her arms and hands as if peeling a rotten banana. She wadded them all up, leaned to one side, and dropped a ball into the large pot on the stove.

“Am I dead?” I asked. I felt dead.

“You fainted,” she replied. “And I fixed your nose.”

“You touched me?” I asked fearfully, and reached for my nose to see if it was still on my face.

“Yes,” she said. “After I got the wax off my fingers they were working okay so I folded some tissues into a wad and shoved them up between your upper lip and gum. That’s what stops a nosebleed.”

“You have fingers?” I asked, confused. I had seen them melt off like the Inca gold being melted down.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m human and I have fingers. They don’t work well because of my arthritis so I have to heat them up in a pot of hot paraffin in order to get them working for about fifteen minutes.”

“Hot what?”

“Hot
wax
,” she repeated impatiently. “You saw me doing it when you came in. Did that smack on your head when you hit the floor give you amnesia?”

I sat up and rubbed the lump on the back of my head. “I thought you were melting your fingers into gold,” I said. “I thought you had gone crazy.”

“I think you’ve gone crazy,” she replied. “You’re delusional. Now let’s not waste any more time. I have a deadline.”

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Writing an obituary,” she revealed.

“Mine?”

“No! You are fine—you’re a spineless jellyfish, but not dead enough to bury. Now take a look at these hands,” she ordered, and thrust them in front of me. They were still bright red from the hot wax and curled over like the talons of a hawk perched on a fence. “I can’t write with them anymore,” she explained, “or do anything that requires fine motor skills. My twin sister used to write out the obituaries for me but her jug-headed idiot husband moved her to Florida last month. I was hoping he’d just have a spasm and drop dead and she would move in with me—but it didn’t work out that way. So you are now my official scribe. I got the idea from reading about President John Quincy Adams. He had arthritis too and when his hands gave out he had a young scribe who wrote for him. I’ll talk and you’ll write. You got that?”

“Sure,” I said, and then she caught me sneaking a peek at the glowing kitchen clock which was in the shape of a giant Bayer aspirin. It was six-thirty in the morning.

“That,” she said proudly, and aimed her chin at the clock, “was given to me by the Bayer Pharmaceutical Company after I gave out over a quarter million of their aspirin tablets to coal miners here in western Pennsylvania who suffered with back pain and splitting headaches.”

“That is a lot of pills,” I remarked, not knowing what else to say but the obvious.

“In nursing school,” she said, “I was taught by the doctors that the role of medical science is to relieve human suffering, and I’ve lived by that motto all my life.”

“What about your hands?” I said, pointing up at them.

“Someday science will solve that. But for now, get up off the floor,” she ordered. “We’ve got to get this obit to the newspaper in an hour so Mr. Greene can print it for tomorrow morning’s edition.”

I stood all the way up and staggered into the living room.

“There’s your office,” she said, and pointed a shiny red hand toward an old school desk and matching chair. “Lift the top.”

I did. There were several pads of lined paper and a bundle of sharpened pencils held together with a rubber band.

“I’ll talk, and you write,” she explained, setting the rules. “If I talk too quickly then you just tell me and I’ll slow down. You got it?”

“Yeah,” I said. I was really ready to do anything that would clear my head from thinking about this old lady melting her flesh in a kitchen pot.

Miss Volker stood by the fireplace mantel and took a breath so deep it straightened out her curved spine.

“Emma Devers Slater,” she started, and sharply enunciated each flinty syllable as if she were using a hammer and chisel to phonetically carve the dead woman’s name onto a stone crypt, “was born on Christmas day, 1878, and died on June 15, 1962, while attending to her prize honeybees, which were once essential for pollinating crops at Norvelt’s community farm. She and her husband were original members of the two hundred and fifty families that started the Homestead of Norvelt in 1934, occupying house A-38, a two-bedroom model.

“The Slater family, which she married into, is an old name in these parts and famous for offspring with extremely hard heads. I remind the reader of the true story of the Slater ‘girl’ who was captured by Indians in the 1830s, knocked unconscious with a war club and scalped with a knife, but still managed to abscond with her life and survive hairlessly to live to a ripe old age beneath a wig made of curly hamster fur.

“And who can forget Emma Slater’s brother-in-law, Frederick, who was tamping an explosive charge into a coal vein with a metal rod when the charge accidentally exploded and propelled the rod up through his cheek and clean out the top of his head? He survived and lived a long life as a traveling medical-miracle circus attraction and made money by charging people a dime to stick their finger into the damp hole in his head. Frederick married another circus attraction who when she was a girl had a piece of white picket fence driven through her upper torso during the great Johnstown Flood of 1889.

“Emma Slater is survived by four loving children who grew up in Norvelt, but none of them live in town any longer, having left to find jobs. Her husband, Herbert Mark Slater, passed away twenty-three years prior from black lung disease after working in the mines at Mutual Shaft all his life except during his military service in World War I and the Great Depression years when the mines were closed. Mrs. Slater belonged to the Mothers’ Club of Norvelt, the Fancy Hat Club, and the Lutheran Church.

“We are grateful for her community service, especially her years as a school crossing guard where she was much loved by children. An open viewing and memorial service will be held at the Oscar Huffer Funeral Parlor next Friday from six until nine in the evening followed by a potluck buffet at the Community Center, where her exceptional needlepoint portrait of our town’s esteemed founder, Eleanor Roosevelt, will be on display.”

Then she bowed her head, closed her eyes, and quietly said a little prayer for Mrs. Slater.

By the time she opened her eyes I had put my pencil down. “Is that it?” I asked, and caught myself panting as if I’d run a marathon. My hand was feeling as cramped as hers looked.

“No,” she replied, “but you can take a break. That’s just the family part I
have
to write. I’ve done the best I can for Mrs. Slater. Writing obits is doing my duty for Mrs. Roosevelt, but it also allows me to write things that people wouldn’t normally read around here. I guess you could say the obits are the honey to attract readers. Now here is the part I
want
to write, so stretch your fingers and get your pencil revved up—people may die but we’ve got some important
ideas
to keep alive.”

Then she awkwardly palmed a small history book with one hand and raised it into the air. Her twisted fingers looked like the rough old roots of a tree that had grown around a clay brick. She puffed herself up like a tent preacher and began to belt out the other half of the story.

“For those of you interested in the history of hardworking people, Mrs. Slater died on the same day as Wat Tyler in 1381. Wat Tyler, who was the heroic leader of the English Peasants’ Revolt, was killed for wanting equality between peasants, who owned no land, and the Royalty and the Church, who owned all the land.

“All Wat Tyler was asking for was that the land be equally divided so that every peasant family could farm and feed themselves. The peasants fought hard with Wat against the king’s army and finally Wat and his force of common people entered London and were poised to take over the city.

“At that time King Richard II was only fourteen years old, but he was surrounded by rich and powerful lords. Wat Tyler was invited to have a private talk with King Richard to solve the land problem. But he was tricked! At the meeting the Lord Mayor of London stepped forward and stabbed Wat in the neck, then had his head chopped off and spiked onto a tall pole as a gory lesson to all who would defy the king and revolt for equal rights.

“After their leader was beheaded the peasant army fled. But for those of us who live in Norvelt—a town of common people who own our own land—we should never forget Wat Tyler and his revolt to make life better for his own people!”

She was really worked up as she paced back and forth and swung her arms around like a windmill. I wrote as fast as humanly possible and did a pretty good job getting it down considering it was my first job as a scribe.

“Any questions?” she asked once she had concluded. “Anything seem unclear to you?”

“Why did you add the part about Wat Tyler?” I asked. “It’s not like Mrs. Slater was alive in 1381.”

“Connect the dots,” she answered impatiently. “Our dear little Norvelt was founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, who knew common people like us wanted equality just like Wat and his people. Our hunger is related to their hunger. Our desire to work hard is related to their desire to work hard. Working people always share the same history of being kicked around by the rich.”

“Okay,” I said, “I get that part. So what is A-38? I never heard of that.”

“Look at the map,” she said, pointing above my head with a finger that was like a bent nail. “See house number A-38?”

I stood up and turned. Mounted behind me was a large needlepoint map of Norvelt which spread across the entire wall. On it were hand-stitched all the streets and houses and gardens and yard animals and businesses and municipal buildings and creeks. There were five sections: A, B, C, D, and E. Beneath each house a number was sewn in next to a last name.

“Take a red-topped map pin from the corner and stick it into house number A-38,” she said. “Emma was the last of the Slater family in Norvelt.”

“What’s this map?” I asked.

“It’s the town you were born in,” she said irritably. “Don’t tell me you are too ignorant to know where you are from?”

“It just doesn’t look like this anymore,” I said. “It’s changed. Like, the Huffer Funeral Parlor isn’t on here. Or the baseball field. Or the hardware store. Or Fenton’s gas station and bar. And you have a Chicken Farm and Community Farm on here that I’ve never seen.”

“You’re looking at the original Norvelt,” she said. “There are two hundred and fifty houses in five sections on this map with the names of the original owners. If you count up the red pins you’ll see that all but nine—eight now that Mrs. Slater has passed—of the original owners have died or left since 1934.”