WLT (17 page)

Francis was sent off to Camp Wigwam, north of Minot. Daddy had been a member of the Brotherhood of Buffaloes and they gave Francis two weeks free of charge at their camp, and Emma paid for four more. The camp was run by six Buffaloes who stayed in a tarpaper shack by the lake and played poker, seldom coming out into sunshine except to tell kids to shut up. It was wonderful. The boys and girls slept on straw beds in old boxcars in the woods, and Francis met a girl named Annie and she slept next to him. The children took off their clothes and played Indian all day. They wore a little breechcloth, or then sometimes they didn't. Francis knew about Indian ways from
Boys
'
Life
so he was the chief, married to Annie, whose Indian name was White Clouds and who was the doctor who examined the Indians when their bodies bothered them. The two weeks when Annie was there were pure shining happiness untroubled by the weary dogfaced world except when the Buffaloes came out and made them play softball or go swimming in the murky water. Francis hated softball. The ball burned his hands. You had to stand around in the sun and be bitten by flies while the other team beat the crap out of you and hooted and sneered. He was terrified of the lake, weedy, teeming with turtles and gator gars, and the moment the Buffaloes went back to their poker game, he led the Indians out of the water and back into the woods. They danced in the grass, naked, and they sang songs that he made up—

And they lay in rows on the grass and Annie came along and touched them and they got over their smallpox. Then he and she retired to their home in a pool of tall grass in a clump of bramble bushes and lay down next to each other and hugged and talked. This seemed to him the happiest conclusion that he possibly could come to. He put his arms around her. She touched him. She said, what is this? He flung his leg over her and they lay a while longer, him running his hand along her skinny back, feeling her spine, her ribs, her wings, the golden down, kissing her. “Lie on top of me,” he said. She stretched out on him, her lips touching his, her belly, her knees, her toes. Then a twig cracked and he looked up and a woman with long black hair peered down at him as if she were going to stamp on them like bugs. “Stand up,” she said.

She wore a long dress and carried a switch; she said, “You're going straight to hell, sonny boy, and when you get there, you won't have this anymore”—and she whipped at his pecker twice—“it'll burn off in the fire.” She told them to come with her and when they picked up their clothes to get dressed, she flung the clothes into a tree. “What you need clothes for? You already showed everybody your bare ass.” She led them along a winding dirt path that went up over the rise and skirted the slough and around up to the county road where a green Model A Ford was parked, covered with dust. She told them to get in. The backseat was torn out, replaced with boards specked with white droppings and feathers and blood. They drove a little way to a road that went far back into the cottonwood trees, to a little white tumbledown house. She locked them in the cellar, in the dark, on a cold dirt floor, naked, with no blanket. “You can study each other down there,” she said. “Sit down there and fool with each other all you like. When you're ready to accept Jesus, knock on the floorboards and you can come right up.” They found three old potato sacks to put over them and he put his arms around Annie and they sat, shivering, looking up at the crack of light around the trapdoor.

“Will she hurt us do you think?” He said he didn't think so. She said she had to whiz. She went into the corner and a moment later he heard her water falling on the dirt. So delicate and musical. When she tiptoed back and stood by him, he took her in his arms again.

“We could go up and accept Jesus,” he said.

“Jesus doesn't go for liars.”

“She's got nothing to do with Jesus. So how can it be a lie?”

Annie didn't have an answer for that. She looked him in the face. “You are my best friend, Franny,” she said after awhile. “I would lie for you anytime.”

He banged on the door. A chair scraped overhead and the woman scuffed across the floor and opened the trap—“Took you long enough,” she said. She hoisted them up and made them kneel right there and accept Jesus, and that seemed to satisfy her. “Now you are newborn children in Christ, fully redeemed and members of the Kingdom,” she announced. She gave them clean sacks to wear and fixed them pancakes for breakfast. “You see, the pleasures of the flesh are the works of the devil, but the joys of the spirit are lasting and true for they come of the Lord. I am so thankful to be the vessel of your redemption. Praise God,” she said, and she kissed them both goodbye and gave them each a Bible verse torn from a calendar.

They hiked back to Camp Wigwam, where the Buffaloes were getting ready to organize a party to search for them. “Oh boy, what a sight for sore eyes,” said one Buffalo, with a mosquito net pinned to his hat. “You damn kids had us worried sick. What are you doing running around in sacks?” He looked away in disgust and went back into the shack and opened a beer.

That night, Annie cried herself to sleep and the next night she wouldn't sleep next to him. She said she was afraid and that nice people didn't do that.

“But you are
indispensable
,” he cried. “Please. Be
magnanimous
. ”

His words did not touch her. She moved to a boxcar where only girls stayed, and she went swimming, and when Francis walked out to her, she swam into deep water, out to the diving dock. He walked in up to his waist, the point of fear, and beyond, to his armpits, and sweetly, despite terrible trembling, he called her name,
Annie
,
Annie
, but she turned her back, and he didn't dare swim to her. She went home when the two weeks were up. The rest of the summer was endless. Francis was so bored, he sat all afternoon on the Buffaloes' porch and read their newspaper. He walked to the southeastern corner of Camp Wigwam, where the fence met a tree that they called The Woodtick Tree, and he climbed up it, despite the ticks, and could see a brilliant light far away, the reflection of the sun on a distant silo roof, and thought, “Minneapolis.”

M
other came back from Fargo exhausted. “Nothing goes right for me,” she said. The treatments had failed and the failure discouraged her. She was discouraged by how discouraged she was. “Other people are braver than me, Francis. I'm not the only one who ever lost a husband. Other women keep going and I don't know why I can't. You've got yourself a rotten mother, that's all. I'm so sorry.” She cried whenever she looked at him now. “You ought to have a happy home like other kids and look at you. You got an old hag of a mother who sits here bawling like a calf. A big baby. That's all I am.” Her day was regulated by the radio. It was the only life she had. She woke early for the Shepherd Boys Quartet singing gospel songs on
The Rise and Shine Show
and she went to bed after
The Calhoun Club Ballroom
and the sweet music of Tommy Leonard and His Lake Serenaders and the dancers slipping quietly around the breezy terrace overlooking Excelsior Boulevard. And in between she followed all her shows faithfully, listening, writing in. She told Dad to beware those man-hunting women and she commended Tiny for always being cheerful (and got back a postcard: “Yo sho' keeps a-makin' me Happy!”). She wrote letters to Little Benny (“I have a boy not much older than you, and when I hear you sing, I like to imagine it's him singing to me”) and she became a member of
The WLT Tip Top Club
—“Whenever you feel blue, think of something nice to do. Don't let it get you down; wear a smile, not a frown. And you'll be feeling tip-top too!” She wrote in regularly to Smilin' Bud Swenson and once received $3 for her poem, “Trees,” which was read on the show.

She subscribed to the
Tip Top
philosophy, to concentrate on the good things and forget the bad, to smile and look forward to tomorrow and do good for others, but, as she explained to Francis, it didn't work for her because she was too weak. She couldn't bear to face the neighbors because they all talked about her and how messy her house was. She couldn't move to Minneapolis because it cost too much and what would she do there? She could only listen to the radio.

That Christmas, 1940, Little Buddy sang “Christmas in the Depot,” about a boy named Little Jim whose daddy had been a railroad engineer and died in a crash—Mother reached over and turned up the radio, and Francis got up off the floor where he was studying Art's special
Geographic
and sat by her on the couch and held her hand—and now Little Jim was lost in the crowded train station on Christmas Eve trying to get back to his dying mother on the Evening Mall—

Mother was radiant. It was the loveliest song she had ever heard. So sad, but she couldn't cry, it was too beautiful. “Things will turn out for us, I know it,” she said. “It's just like the song says.”

“But why does he have to die to be happy?” Francis thought it was the worst song in the history of radio.

“Don't you think Daddy is happy?” she asked. Her upper lip trembled. “I know he is. He says he is. He tells me every day that he is.” She turned off the radio. “Dying is the easy part,” she said softly. “It's the waiting that's unbearable.” Francis turned the radio back on. Little Buddy's dad, Slim, was talking about corn flakes. It would be nice to have a dad, Francis thought, especially one who could play the guitar.