The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove

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.

T
his 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

C
HAPTER
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 folks’ 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.