The Cape Ann (21 page)

And since many of the tavern stories concerned folks now lying beneath the sweet grass in St. Ambrose Cemetery outside Morgan Lake, or St. Leo’s Cemetery on the edge of New Frankfurt, what was more natural than that ghosts should creep into the recitations?

It was because of the ghosts, more than anything, that Mama was reluctant to have me in the tavern. Grandpa Erhardt knew more ghost stories than anyone, and he believed in common ghosts as devoutly as he believed in the
Holy
Ghost. Ghosts were a simple fact of life. Or death. What was the fuss about?

Mama blamed the Old Country for Grandpa Erhardt’s belief. He’d come to America when he was twelve. What you learned before twelve, you never put aside, Mama said. It was easier for her to
blame the Old Country than to blame Grandpa personally. She dearly loved her father-in-law and couldn’t bear to fault him. All the same, she didn’t like me listening to ghost stories.

Grandpa believed in ghosts. Mama didn’t, or said she didn’t. I’d never seen a ghost, but there was in my nature a chink of willingness to suffer. Ghosts and bogeymen sidled in to plague me at odd moments, occasionally in the brightness of a summer afternoon.

Suddenly one of Grandpa’s ghosts, the ghost of Lena Bauer, streaked, screaming, across my mind. I halted in my steps. It had been a cold December, without enough snow to cover the dead ground, when Lena bolted, a ball of fire, out of her kitchen into the barnyard, heading toward the watering trough beside the windmill. Her hair and dress and apron and woolen stockings, and her face and arms were in flames. Lena collapsed at the foot of the windmill, less than a yard from the water.

Sometimes on clear, cold winter nights, Lena dashed again to her death, a ball of fire consuming itself below the windmill. Old Al, long dead now himself, was supposed to have fixed—what was it, a kerosene stove?—that he had neglected, as he neglected so many things. But Lena, who never neglected anything, did not neglect to damn Al with her fiery ghost on winter nights, bringing light without warmth to the sore and dying barnyard.

I sat down at the edge of the sidewalk, there being no true curb on Main Street in Morgan Lake. I was as cold as the inside of a cistern, and a beading of perspiration lay on my upper lip. “Hail Mary, full of grace. Hallowed be thy name,” I prayed, as Father Delias had advised children to do when they were in trouble or afraid.

On the movie screen of my mind, I sent the Blessed Virgin into the barnyard to purge the ghost of Lena Bauer. Out from the barn, where her baby lay in the manger, floated the Virgin, beautiful, ethereal, spectral. Lena Bauer waited, like captured lightning, beneath the windmill, her face a horrid grimace of pain and wrath.

Slowly the Virgin advanced. “Blessed art Thou among women, And blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus.” The light fabric covering Her head fluttered and billowed as She approached. Lena stood her ground, as though the Virgin Herself could not move the force of such pain.

My heart pounded high in my chest. My hands gripped Mama’s coin purse as if it alone anchored me to Main Street.

Mother Mary was quite near Lena now. A soft, white hand was outstretched toward the flaming wraith. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners…” Closer, closer. Both white hands were raised to Lena. “… now and at the hour of our death.”

The Virgin’s arms embraced Lena. Slowly, as if simultaneously recalling something, their heads turned toward me. But in place of the Virgin’s pale, beautiful face, a terrible, grinning skull opened its fleshless jaws and laughed. The two specters, arms around each other, burned holes of laughing hatred into me.

Then I fell asleep, right on Main Street. Sound asleep. I hit my head on the sidewalk, but I didn’t know that until later, when I found the raised blue bump on my temple.

“Lark Ann Erhardt,” Mama’s voice, hissing angry, summoned me. I struggled through a dark tunnel, trying to reach her. A hand sharply gripped my shoulder, shaking me. I heard myself scream.

“What on earth’s the matter with you, young lady? Stop that this minute. Wake up, now.”

Through the tunnel I crawled, at length spying blue sky, a perfect, sunset blue, the color of the Virgin’s scarf. Mama’s face, looking not at all like the Virgin’s, scowled at me, angry and worried.

“Do you know what time it is?” she demanded.

I moved my head slowly to indicate that I did not. Pain sprang into my temple.

“It’s nearly five, for God’s sake. I’ve been waiting and waiting. You left Aunt Betty’s at three o’clock,” she said, pointing to her watch, “and you haven’t even been to the store yet.” She hauled me roughly to my feet. “Look at your dress.”

Five o’clock in the afternoon? And what day? Could it still be Monday? What a long day it had been, without yet being over. I stumbled up the wooden steps into Esterly’s Groceries and General Merchandise, Mama pulling me along like an untrained puppy. I’d been in Esterly’s before, when we visited Aunt Betty and Uncle Stan. Dry goods were on the right, groceries on the left, the post office along the back wall. The place smelled of onions and pickles and raw meat and new overalls and leather work gloves.

Still groggy, I stood leaning against the cool meat case while Mama, relieving me of the shopping list and coin purse, did business with Mr. Esterly.

“My sister, Mrs. Weller, is down in bed, so I’m looking after things for a few days,” she confided. “Do you deliver?”

“If you can wait till we close, I do deliver, some. That’d be after six o’clock, you understand.”

“That’s fine. I’ll take what we need right now, and you can deliver the rest.” She recalled my dazed presence. “My little girl, Lark—you’ve met her, I think—will be coming in for mail and odds and ends. Do the Wellers have an account here?”

There was a pause, the quality of which caused me to prick up my ears, like a dog listening to a sound too high for people to hear.

“Uh, no, no they don’t.” Mr. Esterly wiped his hands on his apron, adjusted the pencil behind his ear, and looked out the front window as if there were something of interest in the street, which of course there wasn’t. Nothing and no one was in the street.

So Uncle Stan didn’t pay his bills. At least not his grocery bills. And if you didn’t pay your grocery bills, you probably didn’t pay others. A swirling, churning, sick feeling came over me. Poverty made me feel weak, as if I were coming down with an awful, debilitating, communicable disease—the disease of being without money. Instead of going to the hospital, you went to the poor farm. The difference was, you never got well at the poor farm.

The pennilessness of the hoboes in the hobo jungle didn’t have quite the same effect on me. I felt very sorry for them, but they didn’t seem to require much: a meal, a pair of cast-off trousers, a dime. But people in houses had bills. Mama had explained all this to me when I asked why we couldn’t charge a new tricycle and a bride doll and a doll house. I hadn’t understood that you had to
pay
for things you charged.

How did Aunt Betty and Uncle Stan live if they couldn’t pay their bills? I turned, laying my temple against the meat case. The news of Uncle Stan and Aunt Betty’s poverty filled me with unnamed fears, which I would now begin to identify. This would not rob them of their power, but it would lend some order to them.

First, how were they going to feed the baby if Mr. Esterly wouldn’t let them charge? Had they been paying their rent? Since we paid no rent in the depot, I was always curious about other people. “How much would you pay for that size house, Mama?” I would ask, estimating whether we might get ourselves into a house in this way. Mama had told me that Uncle Stan and Aunt Betty paid fifteen dollars a month. That was a lot of money, but an amount I thought maybe we could manage. But Papa had a steady paycheck. Uncle Stan worked on commission.

When Mama had considered going to work for the Spenser Corset Company, she’d explained that commission was the money you got from the Spenser Company when you actually sold a corset or girdle or brassiere. The Spenser Corset Company wasn’t going to pay you anything if you weren’t making them any money. This didn’t seem altogether fair, since you probably worked just as hard when the customer didn’t buy a corset as when they did, but Mama said the Spenser people would go broke if they paid salesladies for not selling corsets.

If Uncle Stan wasn’t making any commission, there was the baby to worry about, and the rent. And what about Uncle Stan’s car, which he drove all over southern Minnesota? Was that paid for? It was so old, surely it must be paid up. Our Oldsmobile wasn’t paid up, but that was almost brand new.

“Yes,” Mama answered, as many thoughts or more raced through her mind as were racing through mine, “that’s all right. I’ll be paying cash.” She smoothed the wadded list I’d held in my hand. “Can you read this, Mr. Esterly? It’s smudged.”

The balding, round-faced grocer bent over the piece of paper lying on the counter. “Milk. Eggs. Chicken,” he began reading. “Yes, I can read this,” he murmured, relieved to be finished talking about Aunt Betty and Uncle Stan’s canceled credit.

Before we left the store, Mama said to Mr. Esterly, “I wonder if I could find out how much the Wellers owe you?”

“Oh, dear,” he said, at a loss. “Well, it’s just… the accounts receivable are … confidential.”

“Of course they are,” Mama concurred. “I just thought maybe I could talk to Mrs. Weller’s family. We’re sisters, you know. Our mama and papa might be able to help.”

Mr. Esterly was torn. At length he reached for a five-by-seven card file on the counter beside the cash register. From the W’s he pulled a card labeled “Weller.” He said nothing, but held it for Mama to read the total.

“Thank you,” Mama said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The grocer hurried to the door, holding it for Mama and me as we left. “I’ll bring the other groceries on my way home,” he assured Mama deferentially. “I’ll be closing soon now. Six. I close at six.”

“It’s not his fault,” Mama observed as we stepped along Main Street, past Boomer’s Tavern, where the same couple sat, over the same beers perhaps. “Mr. Esterly has to pay his bills, too.”

But Mama was worried, so worried she forgot to bring up the matter of my falling asleep on Main Street and her leaving Aunt Betty alone to come find me. How much did Aunt Betty and Uncle Stan owe the grocer? And how could Grandma and Grandpa Browning possibly pay the bill when they themselves were just scraping by? There were so many things to worry about! I was going to have to make a list and number them.

BUT WHEN MAMA TUCKED
me in on the living room couch where I was to sleep, instead of reviewing my list of worries and sorting them out, I lay gazing out the window at the pinkish sky over the German Woman’s roof and listening to the low voices of Mama and Aunt Betty, beyond the curtained bedroom doorway. There they sat in the half-light, by turns upsetting and reassuring each other, as sisters do.

“Why didn’t you tell me Stan wasn’t making anything?” Mama asked in a kindly voice.

“He doesn’t want anyone to know,” Aunt Betty replied. “He’s going crazy trying to find money.”

“How does he pay for his room when he’s traveling?”

“He stays with relations. If there’s no one, he sleeps in the car.”

“Umph,” Mama grunted, moved by this information. “He’s never stayed with us.”

“He’s afraid you’ll think he’s a bum.”

“That hurts me.”

“He’s afraid of you,” Aunt Betty admitted, and giggled.

Uncle Stan afraid of Mama? That was one of the most interesting ideas I’d ever heard. Why would he be afraid? She’d never hit him with a ketchup bottle, or even raised her voice to him that I was aware.

“Meantime, you’re laying here starving,” Mama said.

“Don’t be silly,” Aunt Betty responded impatiently. “I haven’t been able to keep anything down. You know that.”

Later Mama said, “I’m teaching myself to type.”

“Why?”

Now it was Mama’s turn to be impatient. “So I’ll be able to get a job.”

“A job? Where would you get a job?”

“I don’t know yet, but I’m going to be ready. When I can type fast enough, I’m going to take the civil service test.”

“But are there any civil service jobs in Harvester?”

“Only at the post office.”

“Aren’t those jobs taken?”

“You never know what’s going to happen.”

It unsettled me when Mama talked that way. Our future was settled. We were going to build #127—The Cape Ann. Papa was going to become the depot agent when Art Bigelow retired. And Mama was going to have a wonderful garden with a strawberry patch and raspberry bushes and flowers all the way around.

The plush of the couch was stiff and prickly. There had been no clean sheet to put under me. But, despite the minor discomfort, I fell asleep about eight o’clock.

In my dreams that night, I was riding the train again, and Angela Roosevelt was seated kitty-corner down the aisle from me. Staring out the window at the passing farms, she wept for them. Quietly and intensely, but without seeming aware of the tears, she sat straight against the tall seat and wept.

I wanted to go to her and comfort her. I wanted to tell her that Earl Samson remembered her and still loved her, for I was certain in my dream that she
did
know Earl and that some shyness and deep regard for his privacy had been at the bottom of her denial.

At last she rose and moved away up the aisle, her back to me. I thought she was going to get a paper cup of water, but she passed the fountain and reached the heavy door. Bracing herself, she pulled it open and stepped out of the car.

Released from my paralyzing bashfulness, I jumped up and ran after her. Tugging open the difficult door, I discovered beyond it the blank face of a boxcar. Angela was gone, disappeared into thin air.

Waking in the dark, shivering, I searched for the old, velveteen crazy quilt Mama had tossed over me. In the warm early evening, I had thrown it off. Now I was chilly.

Arranging it over me, I decided that someday I would look up Angela Roosevelt in Chicago. I hoped to find her married to Earl
Samson. Was there any way I could help bring that about? Could I put a sign down in the jungle, telling everyone who came there that I needed help finding Earl Samson? Would Mama let me do that?