Sparrow in the Wind Page 9

  This was to be my new home! The rude realization chilled my insides like a harsh arctic blast coursing down from Canada. It wasn’t only the certain knowledge that I’d lost everything I knew and loved. In an instant, the dismal surroundings stripped away all childish delusions of self-importance and taught me my rightful place in the scheme of things: my personal happiness wasn’t worth a rat’s ass. I bowed my head and reflected upon this sobering fact as if offering up a moment of silence on Memorial Day.

  Directly above, the piercing screech of a hawk amidst a cacophony of crows interrupted my sorrowful introspection. I shielded my eyes from the bright July sun and peered up at the tall pines. The angry black birds mobbed the intruder, diving like tiny missiles to drive the hawk away, off into the sky until he was but a dark speck and his powerful cry a distant echo. I squared my small shoulders, took a fortifying breath, and resolved to continue my exploration of the place. There was nothing to do but go on.

  Aside from Grandpa’s house, Parsons’ Lodge consisted of three cabins and two outbuildings down in the woods, closer to the river. One was an open pavilion with a single wooden picnic table. I cautiously approached the nearest cabin, which was of bare plywood with no shingles, as if it had never been quite finished. I stood on my toes and peeked into the window. There was a single room with two cots against the wall, a rough wooden table and two three-legged stools. One wall had a built-in plywood counter with storage shelves underneath; the floors and walls were all made of bare plywood. I tried the door and found it unlocked.

  Inside it stank of fish and tobacco and man sweat. There was a black potbellied woodstove on a cement patch and charred wood littered the floor. I saw a soapstone sink with an old fashioned pump. I’d never used one before, so I lifted the handle and pressed down, which was harder than I expected. There was a loud squeak and a groan, but no water came out. I found a metal bucket by the sink, flipped it over and stood on top to get some leverage, then worked the handle up and down with gusto until a trickle of iron-red water ran into the stained sink. I watched it dribble down the drain, then hopped off the bucket and ran outside to see where it went. The water traveled through a short clay pipe to spill onto the open ground.

  It didn’t take long for me to figure out what was in the next building. Yuck. The smell was sickening, but a perverse curiosity got the better of me. I held my hand over my mouth and nose, opened the door, and poked my head inside the outhouse. It was a two-seater. There was a thick oaken plank with two beveled, oval holes cut out side by side, worn smooth from the ample buttocks that’d sat there over the years. It was disgusting, but it made me count my blessings. At least Grandpa’s house had an indoor bathroom with a porcelain commode that flushed.

  I was lucky that old shithouse hadn’t been occupied. When I opened the door to the last shack and peeked inside, I saw a man. He was lying flat on his back on a sagging cot, wearing only grimy-gray undershorts, and snoring loudly through his wide-open mouth. I stared long enough to take in a red beard and a fat belly that looked like a small hill covered in red fur. I backed out slowly and closed the door.

  Dad explained later that the half-naked, hairy man in shack number three wasn’t a guest, but a regular tenant. Mr. O’Hara had made his home at Parsons’ Lodge for the past three years. Apparently, guests had stopped showing up long ago, and the meager rent he paid out of his government check turned out to be the only income, besides Grandpa’s social security. At the supper table, I asked Grandpa about the man with the red beard, but he only barked, “Don’t ya go botherin’ Mr. O’Hara.” I think that was the first complete sentence he spoke to me.

  The inside of Grandpa’s house was much like the outside: grubby and full of junk. The ceilings and walls were in dire need of painting, coated with a yellow-brown film because the old man smoked cigars, and not just in the den. The whole place reeked. It was acrid and foul, nothing like Morfar’s sweet pipe tobacco. In a matter of days, my belongings were permeated with essence of El Producto—my blankets, sheets, and clothes. I sniffed my long braid—only a day after washing it, even my hair stank.

  The only thing in the house that smelled worse was Grandpa Parsons. He customarily bathed only on Saturday nights; apparently, he was a stranger to deodorant. The thick cloud of smoke that usually surrounded him actually helped to mask the B.O. When it hit me for the first time—it was late in the week—he was speaking to my mother, and I was behind him. I got her attention by pinching my wrinkled nose and fanning the air with my other hand to make the point. Mom must’ve been thinking the same thing, because she almost lost it. Grandpa turned around to see what was up behind his back, but I’d already stopped the pantomime and transformed my face into a picture of wide-eyed innocence.

  It didn’t take long to unpack my things and tuck them into the tiny backroom that had been emptied out for me. My “bedroom” was a fairly recent addition behind the kitchen pantry, probably first intended as a mudroom since it had its own door to the outside. Grandpa remarked that it would give me privacy—more like grunted, “It’ll be private for ya.” I was intrigued by the notion of coming and going as I pleased, without anyone taking notice, but the room was so small that my four-poster bed and matching armoire left hardly enough space to move.

  A lot of my stuff had to stay boxed up and jammed under the bed because there was just no place to put it. I didn’t bother to unpack my board games—no one to play them with anyway—or the heavy winter clothes that I wouldn’t need for some months. The single narrow closet wouldn’t accommodate everything at once, so I’d have to rotate by season.

  I supposed I could manage to live with less than half the space, but it was difficult to adjust to the darkness. There was only one small window, so high on the wall that I had to stand on a chair to see out. After a few days of trying to look on the bright side, I had to admit it: I felt like I was living in a shoebox.

  My heart ached for my old bedroom almost as much as it did for Kitty and Tante Gudy. Mine had been the big corner room, with three tall windows facing the street and two smaller ones on the side. The front windows were topped with leaded glass. I’d always been fond of it, but never truly appreciated how grand it was. Kitty lived in a similar style home, and her bedroom was just as nice. I realized for the first time how very privileged I’d been.

  My mother clearly wasn’t overjoyed with our new situation; she was stunned into silence after she’d had her first cup of coffee and took a gander outside under the bright sun. Mom stumbled around the debris, clutching her coffee mug and staring in wide-eyed dismay, like a victim of a natural disaster surveying the wreckage of a lost home. After her second cup of coffee, she regained her composure and took me aside, warning me not to complain in front of Daddy or Grandpa Parsons, “Not even one little bit.” She remarked that my father seemed happy again, and that’s all that mattered. After the incident with him on the road to Blackstone, she didn’t have to tell me twice.

  My father certainly did appear to be happier than he’d been in a long time, seemingly in inverse proportion to my misery. From the first days at Parsons’ Lodge, a great change came over him until I hardly recognized the irritable, taciturn, sedentary man I’d known for the last couple of years. He rose early each morning and set to work with boundless energy. When he wasn’t busy loading trash into Grandpa’s old truck to make a dump run, he was up on a ladder. In between, he scurried about with a notebook and pencil, measuring and jotting away. I’d never seen him lift a finger to fix anything around our old house. He declared he wouldn’t even change a washer in the sink since he paid my aunt rent, and it wasn’t his sink.

  Having thrown in her lot with her husband and crossed the point of no return, Mom put a smile on her face and pitched in to help with the cleanup effort. She even offered to redecorate the cabins and hang curtains so it would be more attractive to the sportsman’s wives since Dad expressed his intentions to make Parsons’ Lodge a family vacation spot. He told us excitedly over breakfast about everyt
hing from building a redwood sauna, to putting kitchenettes with propane stoves in the cabins. Mom interjected that the first priority for those cabins was to install indoor plumbing with proper toilets, to which Dad heartily agreed. When she suggested it, he even laughed out loud and reached over to affectionately squeeze her hand, something I hadn’t seen in a long time.

  Grandpa listened silently, puffing his cigar. He eyed me across the table as if he’d snagged a smallish fish on his line and wasn’t sure if it would make a decent enough meal to bother with.

  AS PROMISED, A man with a backhoe turned up two days later to dig a pit for the new septic tank so that the cabins could have indoor plumbing. But the first order of the day was to bury the old shithouse. Bit by bit, the dirt was scooped away until a suitable grave was dug adjacent to the decrepit wooden shack. The backhoe made a loud, grinding mechanical sound. I stood with my parents at a safe distance and watched in fascination.

  Everyone forgot all about Mr. O’Hara. He suddenly burst from the door of his cabin, jumping around with one leg in his pants in his haste to see what was making the racket—just in time to watch the destruction of his second favorite place on earth.

  Mr. O’Hara went still and white as death. His mouth dropped open, and his pants fell to his ankles as he gripped what was left of his sparse, greasy hair. I was afraid he might tear it out in despair, but he rallied, kicking loose his britches as he swore a string of mighty oaths, rushing in his underdrawers to what was left of the timbers with arms outstretched, as if to rescue a child from peril. Mr. O’Hara stopped just shy of tumbling into the void along with his beloved, teetering on the edge of the pit as the steel bucket of the backhoe rose and came down without mercy. The brittle wood splintered with a resounding crack.

  All that was left in one piece was the solid oaken plank with the smooth double seats, that singularly sweet spot where the old Irishman had spent many a satisfying hour. Mr. O’Hara wept openly as it was covered over with dirt.

  12

  BLACKSTONE WAS BIGGER than many of the towns we’d passed on our way up but quite small compared to Racine and not nearly as modern. I bought some postcards to show my friends back home, old black-and-white pictures of the downtown, taken in 1910.

  It hadn’t changed all that much. The mile-long Main Street was paved in the original gray cobblestones, and Swenson’s Drugstore still stood on the corner of Third and Main, across from one of the first Five and Dimes. Mom remarked that it was like stepping out of your car and landing forty years back in time, but Blackstone was not without a certain charm. The small population and slow pace of life made people more open and trusting of one another. I had to stop and smile when I saw the rack of big black umbrellas in the lobby of Northern Bank and Mortgage, standing at the ready for patrons caught in the rain. The sign read: Yours to Borrow and Return Tomorrow.

  Among the more recent additions to Main Street was a fancy gift shop called The Purple Hyacinth. They sold bone china and other fine things that no one really needed, like the glass unicorn sitting in the display window. Naturally, Mom and I had to go inside to look, although she told me not to touch anything since we were definitely not there to buy. I was fascinated by the unicorn with its little horn coated in twenty-four karat liquid gold; the tiny crystal creature looked so fragile that my mother warned me not even to breathe on it. She said it reminded her of a sad story she’d read in high school about a lonely crippled girl with only glass animals for friends.

  The gift shop was adjacent to a place called Second Hand Rose, leading to an odd juxtaposition of clientele going in and out the front doors. In 1962, thrift stores were not trendy places where well-off people sometimes went to select chic vintage clothing, at least not in Blackstone. Thrift stores were where poor people shopped because they couldn’t afford to buy new clothes. I would soon find out that to come to school in hand-me-downs, anything shabby, or years out of style was to brand a child forever as part of a lower caste.

  I’d never been in a thrift store and wanted to have a look inside, but Mom said no; she was afraid someone would see us going in. I cupped my hands around my eyes, pressed my nose to the plate-glass window, and gawked at the racks of moth-eaten wool coats and bins of children’s mittens. There were two cardboard boxes overflowing with all sorts of underwear, one for men and the other for ladies, each marked “25 cents apiece.” I saw everything from briefs to boxer shorts, and little girls’ panties to huge brassieres of the type worn by plump matrons, all of it looking dingy and yellowed. Once again, it dawned on me how privileged I’d been; I had no idea that some people resorted to wearing used underpants.

  Children of financially stable working folks such as farmers, shop owners, and skilled laborers, got a set of new clothes and shoes every year. The social classes were further divided by whether the clothes were purchased locally, which was acceptable, or whether one’s parents drove to Duluth to shop for fine apparel in the very latest fashion. Those girls were the daughters of professional men, bankers, lawyers, and doctors, and they tended to clump together.

  The Five and Dime carried the bare essentials: work clothes, jackets, sneakers and boots, packages of underwear, as well as seasonal items like hats and gloves. They were very inexpensive but tended to be cheaply made. Still, in the eyes of the children, it was much better to get new Five and Dime clothes rather than stooping to Second Hand Rose.

  Most of the townsfolk bought all their clothes and housewares from Baker’s Department Store, established in 1907. They tended to stock a limited selection of sturdy clothing with the emphasis on utility rather than style for the practical needs of the local working people. Baker’s also carried footwear, including the best selection of waterproof winter boots. There was one specialty shoe store in town if you didn’t like the selection at Baker’s. Brown’s Shoes were of better quality and usually cost a bit more. You could tell by looking which children got their shoes at Brown’s.

  No matter one’s social rank, everyone who hunted got their gear at Baker’s, from padded camouflage overalls and jackets to guns and ammo. The boys of less affluent fathers wore their heavy camouflage jackets everywhere, including school. It wasn’t just because it was the only coat they owned: it set them apart from the namby-pamby town boys and identified them as hunters and rugged outdoorsmen.

  The first time we drove by Baker’s, I noticed the old wooden mannequins smiling pleasantly in the front display window with their otherwise naked torsos draped in sheets. “Uh, is that what they wear up here in the summer?” I asked, wondering if it was the latest fashion in Blackstone.

  “Oh, gosh no,” Mom said with a chuckle. “Whenever the storeowners are changing all the clothes to get ready for a new line, they cover them up.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I suppose it’s because there are strict Catholics and old-fashioned Lutherans in town who might be offended to see them, uh . . . exposed.”

  “Ha. What a bunch of puritanical hooey,” Dad scoffed. “Those dummies don’t have anything under the sheets to expose. I think it makes ’em look like they’re having a toga party,” he said wryly.

  “What’s a toga party?” I asked.

  “Never mind,” Mom intercepted the explanation.

  THE RESIDENTIAL PART of town was laid out in a grid pattern with numbered streets and avenues. Closer to the town center, the houses along First Street and First Avenue were very large and ornate, with well-manicured grounds and paved sidewalks out front. Many were examples of the famous old Lumber Baron homes, built at the turn of the century by the men who made their fortune from logging. The grand dwellings were slowly being bought up by young, educated professionals who commuted to work, some all the way to Duluth, Minnesota. One had been restored as a Bed and Breakfast, and my mother was dying to look inside. We waited until it was just the two of us out shopping for groceries and decided to ask for a tour. The owner was only too happy to show it off.

  Mom explained that the lumber barons built their homes w
ith as much wood as possible to display their wealth and status, but nothing prepared me for what I saw inside. As soon as we walked through the custom-oak front door, I was struck by the fact that every conceivable surface was covered in sumptuous woodwork—from the parquet floors to the panels of oak, maple, and walnut spanning the walls of every room. Even the edges of the ceilings were trimmed with carved cornice moldings. In the main hallway, there was a wondrous winding staircase with a banister at least six inches wide, culminating in a curlicue the size of my head. It was finished in rich dark walnut and looked so smooth and shiny, I wanted to walk up the flight of stairs just for the treat of running my hand along the banister.

  The mahogany mantelpiece in the great room was an extravagant work of art, crafted by a German artisan back in the late 1880s. Above the hearth, there was an expansive scene of men hunting, all carved in high relief from a single slab of wood. The men held rifles and were followed by dogs as they pursued a herd of running deer. A buck with great antlers stood out in front, as if ready to take on the men while the does and their young fled into the forest. Every branch on the tall pines was carved in fine detail. A bird of prey soared over the trees.

  BY THE TIME you got to West Fourth Street, the houses began to look more like the ones from my old neighborhood, except that they were all one-family homes. They seemed to shrink the further away you went from the town’s center, but they were still well kept and painted with little picket fences around the yards—until you crossed the railroad tracks on the south side of town. We drove down that way once when Mom was looking for a hardware store and went too far. Ninth Street was only a dirt road with one last row of tiny wood-frame houses. We saw some filthy little kids sitting on the ground, digging in the hard red earth with garden spades and old spoons, while their young mothers stood huddled together and talked. The women wore faded housedresses and soiled white sneakers with no socks; some had plastic curlers in their hair. Strangers must have been a rarity down that way, because as we drove past, they all stopped gabbing and stared with hard, unsmiling eyes.