Over and Under (12 page)

I dropped down beside him Tom was positively glowing.

“How are you going to get that thing home?” I asked.

“I’ll hide it in the back of my dad’s truck. I’ll take it out tonight and hide it in the woods, take it to the cave when I get a chance. Next time, though, we’re goin’ lookin’ for them.”

“I still don’t think you should have taken anything from a museum,” I said self-righteously.

Tom laughed. “Well, you did.” He pointed at my hands.

And I had. Without realizing it, I had taken the copy of Borden’s
Personal Reminiscences.
So we were both thieves.

Tom ran over to his dad’s truck and shoved the sword under the tarp just as the doors of the institute burst open and union men began rolling out, smiling and lighting one another’s cigarettes. We turned to face them, trying to look casual.

“What’d you decide?” Tom asked two of the strikers as they passed.

“We’re all sorry about Don Strange,” said one of them. “We’re buying flowers out of the strike fund.”

“And we’re staying on strike until hell freezes over,” said the other. Those strikers close enough to hear him cheered.

I rode my bike home with the book shoved up my pants leg. My father was waiting for me in the living room, lying on the couch and reading
Chesapeake.
I could tell the second I walked in, from the quiet and from the general sense of emptiness, that Mom was not home, perhaps instead at one of her feminist gatherings in Louisville, or on a secret errand for the sheriff.

Dad greeted me with an eager smile. “Did you see any?”

For a second, I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Then it all came back to me, along with the fear that my stolen book was about to fall out of my pants leg, and that Dad would be able to smell the fine bouquet of Ray’s weed coming off my clothes. He waited for an answer.

“They were falling like rain,” I said.

Numerous historic preservation groups tried to save the institute, but in the end its own grand scale worked against it, making it prohibitively expensive to renovate, and too big to be of any real practical use in our small town. Despite the fact that the building had been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973, it was condemned by the state fire marshal. Since it was so close to the grammar school, local officials finally decided to demolish the building in 1983, calling it a safety hazard to the romping schoolchildren nearby. I stood in the parking lot and watched them destroy it the day before leaving for college.
In all, William Borden’s building had lasted ninety-nine years, which I think to a geologist would seem like just the blink of an eye. What remained of Professor Borden’s collections were carefully inventoried by the preservationists, crated up, and sent three hundred miles away, to the Field Museum in Chicago. So, looking back, I think Tom was right. I’m glad at least one of those swords is still in Borden, and yes, I think Professor Borden would be happy about it, too.

They buried Don Strange the next morning. I sweated in the front yard in my blue JCPenney sport coat and clip-on tie as my parents finished getting ready inside. Tires crunched on the gravel of Cabin Hill Road, a sound soon followed by Tom’s father driving past in his blue Dodge truck. I automatically lifted my hand to wave, and he briefly made eye contact with me and waved back. His eyes went quickly back to the road. My father was on the front porch in his suit by then, looking out at me with an expression I couldn’t decipher.

The service was at St. Mary of the Knobs Catholic Church, a center of community life I had been to many times, even though I wasn’t Catholic. I’d attended weekly meetings in their parish hall during my brief hitch with the Cub Scouts. We went to their Strawberry Festival every March, where my dad and I would eat shortcake and Mom would buy a raffle ticket for a quilt made by the Knights of Columbus ladies’; auxiliary. I’d even been to a wedding inside the church once, the only wedding I had ever seen, when a man my dad worked with invited us the summer before.

My father had complained that local law enforcement
would never challenge the strikers. Now we had state troopers at our funerals, observing the mourners from their black-and-white Crown Vic a respectful distance away. Inside the church, Don Strange lay on pillowy white satin inside a gleaming walnut casket, finally trying out one of the products he had been constructing his entire life. The walnut, it occurred to me, had sprung from southern Indiana dirt, and would now return to it, just like Mr. Strange.

The crowd in the church was arranged into two halves, in a way that reminded me of the bride’s side and the groom’s side in that wedding I had been to. In this case, plant management and Bord en’s small merchant class sat on one side of the church. The strikers sat on the other much more crowded side. The strikers looked as uncomfortable as I did in their suits, and I noticed that most of them, like Tom’s dad, came alone, leaving their families at home, making that side of the church overwhelmingly adult and male. I wondered if it was because they anticipated danger in some way, although I doubted that, because any inkling of danger and my mother wouldn’t have let me within a hundred miles of the church. Maybe they didn’t want their families to see Mr. Strange laid out like that, the rosary wrapped around his clasped dead hands.

Sprinkled randomly among us, oblivious to the seating protocol of our two rival camps, were Mr. Strange’s relatives and friends from out of town. There were two svelte daughters from the swank suburbs east of Louisville, jarringly beautiful women in black dresses and wide hats. There were crying grandchildren, old casket company associates, an aging army buddy in an American Legion hat, and a young grandnephew in a white navy uniform.

An unseen organ announced the start of the service with a startling minor chord. A smoldering censor swinging in front of them, a column of priests, deacons, and altar boys marched into the church, singing hymns in a mournful baritone, sending chills up and down my spine. In my fourteen years, I had been exposed just enough to the Catholic religion to become completely fascinated by it. When the priest began the mass from the front of the church, I noticed that the strikers more or less all crossed themselves in unison, while many on the management side of the church did not. Mr. Strange had labored in the mill room for a decade or so before working his way into management, and it appeared that at least as far as his faith was concerned, he had more in common with the rank and file than he did with management. Old stained-glass windows along each side of the church depicted the church’s numerous patron saints in various stages of martyrdom, and a small plaque at the bottom of each thanked a familiar family name for their generosity a century earlier: Kruer, Stemler, Huber, and so on.

I was impressed with the studied impassiveness of the priest. Our preacher down at Blue River Christian Church always seemed like he was trying to sell us salvation with amplitude and clever sermons. To hold our interest, he had to play the opposing trump cards of eternal bliss and eternal damnation. The Catholic priest, in contrast, was stern and removed in a way that seemed confident to me, as he wearily executed the rites of his church. He wasn’t trying to convince me of anything—he had two thousand years of tradition on his side. If you don’t believe any of this, he seemed to be telling us, that’s your problem. “What right
have you to recite my statutes?” he intoned. “To take my covenant on your lips, when you detest my teaching and thrust my words behind you?” I turned my head slightly from side to side, trying to identify to whom the priest was addressing the accusation.

When it came time for communion, the labor side of the church filed out of their pews smartly, while we had to step awkwardly aside to let those few Catholics on our side pass by into the aisle. I watched them all walk right up to the priest, who was directly in front of Mr. Strange’s casket, and accept the Eucharist. About half the mourners, I noticed, looked inside Mr. Strange’s casket as they passed. They glanced into it quickly, as if they weren’t supposed to, and maybe they weren’t. I didn’t know what the rules were. I just knew that for the first and only time that day, I was glad to be in the Protestant minority. I knew I would not have been able to avoid peering inside the casket if I walked up there, and I knew doing so would give me nightmares for weeks. We stepped outside for the burial.

The cemetery was right next to the church. To get to Mr. Strange’s grave, we had to walk through the older sections, where the epitaphs were written entirely in German. At Mr. Strange’s grave, a row of chairs and a small Caterpillar backhoe awaited us. A green tent had been set up with enough room for Mr. Strange’s closest relatives to sit in the shade. Behind it, the gravedigger snuck a cigarette and waited for his cue. Graveside, the priest pointed out to the crowd that Mr. Strange was being buried right next to Mavis, his beloved wife, who had died fifteen years earlier. After a few comments more they lowered Mr. Strange into
the ground, and the service was over. Dad took a few minutes to shake hands with some of the old-timers who had shown up for the funeral. All of them wanted to talk about the strike. My father did not.

The strikers stood around the outside of the church smoking, their jackets on their shoulders or hung on low tree branches, ties loosened, sweat beading on their foreheads. I realized that I was accustomed to seeing these men exhausted, either plodding into the factory at dawn, or treading across the parking lot at the end of a shift, covered in varnish, sawdust, and fatigue. Seeing them this way, large groups of them rested and idle, was a slightly scary revelation. They all quieted as we passed. Normally my father was the kind of guy who would start a twenty-minute conversation with the guy bagging his groceries. Upon seeing someone from the plant, he usually rejoiced and gossiped like he had found a long-lost cousin. After the funeral he hustled Mom and me as rapidly as he could to our car with his eyes straight ahead.

We were almost to the car, passing a small knot of strikers, when just two feet in front of us Tom’s dad turned around and started walking toward the church, toward us. There was no way to tactfully avoid him; he and Dad almost collided. I could tell by the way Dad stiffened that it was exactly the encounter he had wanted to avoid.

“Howdy, George,” said my mom and dad simultaneously.

“Howdy,” he said back, trying harder than my father to hide his discomfort. Even so, he looked haggard, more genuinely mournful than his cronies, who turned discreetly to see how the conversation was going. “Sad day,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” said my dad. He was stubbornly refusing to take the conversational bait. In normal times he would have been halfway through the shitting-in-the-paddock anecdote.

“I’ve known Don all my life,” said George Kruer, trying to fill the void. “I just… I just never thought something like this would happen here.”

“I guess there are evil people everywhere,” said my dad. George Kruer raised an eyebrow at that, allowing my dad a second to qualify his statement or tone it down. But he didn’t.

“Nobody wanted this to happen,” responded Mr. Kruer. He was defensive, but I thought I detected the slightest note of guilt in his voice, too.

“Looks like somebody did.”

Mom stepped in, trying to bring us back around to the kind of weightless declarations that normally filled the air after a funeral. “We’ll all miss him, very much.”

“The plant won’t be the same without him,” said George.

My dad just nodded and stared past him, refusing to allow the conversation a peaceful death. Finally, Kruer turned uncomfortably around, abandoning whatever chore he had inside the church, returning instead to the safety of his union pals. We finished our short walk to the car.

When we got in, my father turned the key and sighed loudly. I suddenly realized how draining the funeral had been for him. Mother patted his knee sympathetically.

“They’ve got a lot of nerve showing up here like that, don’t they?” he said.

My mother removed her hand quickly and looked out the window.

“Come on, it’s not like Don died of a heart attack,” my dad responded.

“Stop.” Mom was offended. “This doesn’t have anything to do with the strike. Most of these men have known Don Strange since they were boys.”

“Nothing to do with the strike?” My father started to prepare a more detailed rebuttal, but thought better of it, and drove us home in silence.

I always slipped into kind of a trance in the backseat of Dad’s smooth Buick back then, especially when the air-conditioning was cranked up on a sweltering day. The thought of Don Strange’s death, the image of that gleaming casket sinking slowly into the ground, pushed me further into a kind of melancholy fog. I was staring out my window when we turned down our driveway, looking down the barely visible path Tom and I ran on the night of the explosion. Dad pulled up to the house and kept the car running for just a moment longer than normal, a change in rhythm that dragged me out of my trance. When I looked up, Dad was staring straight ahead, his hands clenching the steering wheel. Mom was crying softly for the first time that day, her hands up to her mouth.

YOUR NEXT
had been painted in large brown letters on our garage door.

Sheriff Kohl came up immediately. Once he arrived, he sat in the driveway for just a few seconds in the brown Crown Vic, writing studiously in a small notepad. He reviewed his notes with a furrowed brow, then exited the car as we watched.

He was tall and slim in a way that for some reason reminded me of cowboys. The gun on his belt suited him: a .357 Colt Python with a royal blue barrel and a grip of dark, polished walnut, a serious gun for a serious man. His uniform was immaculate, all the way down to where the cuffs of his perfectly creased pants broke against the tops of his shiny brown shoes. Sheriff Kohl had a way of always looking equally concerned, whether he was arresting a drunk driver, handing out Halloween candy at city hall, or singing “I Saw the Light” from the main stage of the Strawberry Festival. Sheriff Kohl looked good, and he looked like a lawman, both of which helped him win reelection, term after term.