Glencross said, “Excuse my hat, ladies—it somehow fell in the mud.”
Ruby responded, “About any ol’ hat looks good on a man who knows how to wear one, and that man’s you.”
At the Glencross house that week Alma avoided him as much as she could, kept herself busy in other rooms, doing other chores, for she was pretty sure she knew what was coming. And it did come, in an envelope Glencross put into her hands and said, “Pass that along, won’t you?”
At the Dunahew shack she and Ruby stared at the envelope and smelled its scent of vanilla and admired the fine script. They had to wait more than an hour for a child to come home and read the enclosed card to them. Sidney, nearly nine at the time, opened the envelope and read: “Dear Ruby, I have a business trip down to Mammoth Spring—would you care to take a ride into the country with me? I expect it to be this Monday. I have cleaned my hat. Say you will and tell Alma.”
Reporters arrived from all across the nation and encouraged the profusion of theories and suspects, making their stories pop with color and intrigue they might not have invented entirely, but certainly in part. The first person to confess did so within a day of the blast, a fractured widow-woman named Watts who lived in the spare room of a spinster daughter and said she did it with bombs the Huns had smuggled over awhile back and hid under the Fussell Creek bridge because her son never visited her anymore and was likely dancing with men again since he was still alive and a devotee of sins that can’t be spoken. The papers ran with the confession for one edition, then dropped it without further comment and listened instead to Fred Crown, a war veteran and former fireman, who said, “Only dynamite skillfully placed could have blown that building so thoroughly to bits.”
The first suspects were picked by Mrs. Howard E. Tompkins, who said that those Gypsies camped beside Blue Spring (there are several Blue Springs in the region, this one being the smallest and closest to town) had threatened all citizens in no uncertain terms. Mrs. Tompkins had been suckered out of six bits and taken advantage of only two days before the disaster by dusky fortune-tellers who kept seeing into her future and predicting experiences that Mrs. Tompkins had already by-gum had; she’d long before met a sightless man in a black hat on a rainy day, had a child get cut bad but live without a scar, and found a blue egg under a laying hen that was hollow and floated like a cottonwood puff. They were seeing her past and selling it back as her future, the liars. Her husband asked Sheriff Adderly to chastise the Gypsies for charging seventy-five cents to tell his wife that her future consisted of events she’d already put behind her, and he had, a tad roughly. The boss fortune-teller, in her multihued headdress and bangles and beads, raised her index and little fingers in the sign of the horns as led away, and said, “You’ll see gray skies with no stop. Gray skies spread inside your chests of bones to stay and above your heads forever. Fie on you one and all.”
After the explosion that woman’s dire comment was enough to suggest their involvement as a tribe in this terrible revenge, and Mrs. Tompkins made the suggestion loudly and often, even if most of the Gypsies had been locked up when the night sky turned yellow. The jail was in the courthouse, six cells on the third floor, and a mob carrying noosed ropes quickly assembled at the front door to jeer the Gypsies and threaten them with hanging or worse if they didn’t come clean, admit their evil, point out the ones who’d planted the bombs. Deputy Bob Jennings said at least two of the male Gypsies let messes into their trousers when questioned with billy clubs, and the women knelt below the barred windows, keened and threw shrill prayers skyward at some greaser god he didn’t recognize or care to meet. When the sheriff released the Gypsies four days later he did so after midnight and escorted their slow parade of caravans to the county line where he used a bull-whip to encourage them to move along quickly and get gone from his sight.
Sheriff Shot Adderly was a country galoot from some hopeless crossroads who’d come to town and found society pleasing and his calling as a lawman. His given name was a homemade epic, Leotozallious, but he’d been nicknamed Peashot as a teen because of his small size, the name shortened to Shot as he matured, a substitute name he was ever so glad to have considering the one he’d been assigned at birth. A year later, when nothing had become clear to the public and the Citizens’ Commission Inquiry had been seated, Sheriff Adderly said, “If I was to tell all I know about the Arbor Dance Hall blast there’d be lynchings from here to St. Louie.”
Mr. Lawrence Meggs hung sucker-bags from trees at the edge of his yard and ate venison year-round. He had thirty acres, mostly on a slant, and a slanted garden he’d made bountiful by pushing four hundred wheelbarrow loads of barnyard dung through the creek and uphill from his neighbors’ place. His folks were gone and it was all his to tend and he’d only ever gotten away from this land one time. He’d gone to Kansas City to visit cousins for a month the winter he turned nineteen. He’d been very ill at ease among so many streets and strangers, so many voices that talked another lingo, was gawky at everyday sights and unnerved especially by the sweet and curvy temptations of the nights. At the third twilight he put his Bible on the closet shelf and laid his hat over it and his cousins’ bad example soon enough put him at ease with a couple of simple sins, neither of which he had ever given up—sipping devil juice and whoring. He went to the Chesterfield Club in the middle of the day and the waitresses there didn’t wear shirts or dresses or even little aprons, but served blue plate specials bare-assed and smiling, standing with their secret hairy parts at eye level while he pointed at the menu, and he spun away from there after lunch so puffed with lust that he’d had to pay twice before teatime at Mrs. Vanatta’s on Grand. He returned to the hills different and kept his mouth shut about it, mostly, but no longer felt worthy of marriage, a blessed state, his favored sins yet surging alive within him and released so regularly he dropped churchgoing so as not to be phony in God’s house and only read his Bible when the weather kept him from walking to the crossroads for sunken company or into town for a dance.
Harlan explained, “It was more than the dead, boy, it was also the maiming, the ruining, breaking folks into parts that left them incomplete but still breathing. You’d see them pretty regular limping down the avenue, maybe using crutches, or trying to work with one arm at a two-armed job, buying face powder by the bucketful to hide the scarring, certain ladies always wearing knotted scarves so you might not notice there’s ears missing off their heads. This town had some mighty scarred and torn citizens and we noticed them a lot ’til the next war came, when pretty soon scarred wasn’t the worst that could happen to a citizen. Larry didn’t have anything left to call a body but his trunk section, plus a cooked arm that dangled awful limp but could lift a cup. An aunt on his mom’s side and her husband moved up from around Bull Shoals to look after him out there. I always did like ol’ Larry just fine, you know, knew him about all his life, but I suppose I visited him less than I ought to’ve done. A lot less. In about 1935 he somehow rolled downhill into the creek, and I was happy for him.”
The Dunahews had in 1890 turned their backs from the green places, the unfurling mud of the old home, and trudged toward factory money and landless days, lured to town by a tall gray pipe puffing smoke that marbled darkly into a stoic sky, and there they soon became chained as a family to that very smokestack by a stub of pay that amounted to almost enough. Town was a fresh confusion, so many faces that would never be named or known, everything run by a congress of social power they could feel squatted on their shoulders but never see plainly or throw off, the rules of life now strayed a giant step or two sideways from the direct and bristly ways of conduct they’d known and understood in North Carolina, Kentucky, and most recently on Egypt Creek where it meets Big Chinkapin.
Grandpa Buster was born in town within weeks of the clan’s arrival, and his lifelong loss of balance was expected from his birth. He was a babe that wanted six hands to pull him from the womb, his first squall a wail of horror at this eviction, a cry of dispossession that was re
membered and seemed all his days to be poised near his lips for another release, another howling from the lost place inside. He became okay-looking and long, smart enough but smiling more than was required, as he was so often guessing at just what was expected of him or called for in response, hence the reflexive teeth-baring at veiled insults or insults outright, news of the weather, the war with Spain, a death in the family. He hoped to be liked by all and was easily urged by peers toward silly errors that greatly amused those who’d done the urging.
His youth was a torment of social distress and unnecessary smiles, with nothing to recommend him as a figure of worth until a posse of native teens went to the hobo camp across the rails and started a ruckus for sport, which aroused three hardened ’boes who’d fight and gave chase, and Buster, not so fleet of foot, turned when caught and threw a right-handed punch that found a chin and dropped the biggest hobo to the mud, left him there senseless. Just one punch and the man fell like a sandbag and after that jokes on Buster began turning toward the benign and affectionate or inclusive.
With no ground to plant and share the Dunahew clan fragmented by 1912 and scattered in pursuit of unlinked futures elsewhere, while Buster remained but would not seek work beneath the local smokestack, just wouldn’t do it, and instead painted signs, houses, barns, as part of a crew headed by Mr. Loyce Mackay. He married Alma in January of 1916, and none too soon if yellowed birth certificates are accurate. He worked for Mackay and struggled with a dual matrimony, having become betrothed to the bottle also, a love he encountered early and fell for straightaway. It looked for all the world like he was having the highest of high old times when he’d been drinking young and gleaming, sowing oats, being a little wild, stacking empties on the windowsill, laughing too much, dancing too late, knocking a fella senseless now and then when a wild night turned mean.
There were things Alma would never tell me, and one was how she’d met Buster, a subject that made her sniffle. I used to hazard guesses, some of which offended her (“I never took a drink in my life!”) and none of which (“You seen the birth papers and you can do numbers, so don’t ask me that again or I’ll snatch you bald-headed.”) she answered. All she ever presented as a response was “I loved what there was of him. Still do.”
Alma earned a pittance and combined with his pittance they got along barely until the first child joined them. As James grew and added his needs to the economic grind, Buster turned hugely patriotic overnight and sailed away with our troops to Europe, anything to get him out of the house and stark proof of his daily failings as a provider and teetotal. He had a bad go overseas with the AEF, smelled mustard gas somewhere in France, shot occasionally toward enemies he could hear but seldom saw and lost three toes to trench foot, returned to the shack with shined eyes and a shambling gait. The blue monster that has fed on almost my entire family had swallowed Buster whole before he boarded the ship for home, and possibly before he boarded the ship going over or threw that right-handed punch.
He did in his veteran funk shortly become a drop-down drunk who could many times be found on the sidewalk at sunup, a figure of torpor and ongoing disgrace his own sons had occasion to step over going to school, walking on with eyes averted while not mentioning him and hoping no one else would, either. (John Paul would during his marriage oft endure this comment and variants from Harlan Hudkins, “I recall so well seeing your daddy on the sidewalk before breakfast with spittle dried on his face, and it always made me feel so safe, so very safe, don’t you know, ’cause whilst I slept comfy in a feather bed ol’ Buster Dunahew was out braving the night and keeping an eye on things for all of us, keeping a lonely vigil out there without needing to be asked—it was like having a watchdog that spoke English when it was sober. I bet you felt proud.”) He was evicted from the shack but often encountered around town in various ignoble postures and soaked states of mind. This went on for years, paused for pneumonia and a recuperative season in the shack, then went on for more years still. But there did come a morn in autumn of 1928 when he awoke in a wet gutter near the square and was stunned by the awesome beauty in an ordinary dawning, sunlight bursting onto window glass, clouds riffling among many colors, a bird on a wire, a dripping of oil that stretched a partial rainbow down the grimed pavement, and vowed to Glory while still supine to become temperate. He tried and shook and sweated, begged Alma to let him come home, but she had no reason to believe in his cure so soon and said, Not yet, not yet, just remember I love you. Grandpa Buster Dunahew, dry as perdition for nearly five months, died in a confusing car wreck (not his own car, but a rackety Ford on permanent loan from Arthur Glencross, for whom he secretly chauffeured) on the Eleven Point Road near Mountain View, twenty-three days before the Arbor Dance Hall blast.
Her hands ached always before she was out of her teens, joints risen, knuckles become bulbs, and it was those aching and distorted hands that she spread flat and warm on each and every of the twenty-eight caskets assembled in the high school gymnasium. There was no other site in town vast enough for a mass funeral, and even here there was an overflow out front, onto the street and into the vacant lot beyond. A long, long line of sighing mourners filed past, each casket heaped with flowers, the mass of them surrounded by framed portraits on stands, cards of farewell written in block print or intimate cursive, stuffed animals to carry along to heaven, three baseball mitts, a military helmet, a hunter’s horn, a velveteen smoking jacket. Alma touched all twenty-eight and kissed them each, kneeling to kiss the fresh black paint between her spread aching hands, said the same words to accompany every kiss because there was no way to know which box of wood held Ruby, or if she rested in only one, had not been separated into parts by crushing or flames and interred in two or three, so she treated every box as though her sister was inside in parts or whole and cried to the last.
James was stony-faced and stiff, held himself to be too old for weeping and too tough, but Sidney and John Paul wailed behind Alma’s skirt, tapping little fingers on the spots where she kissed, their faces crumpling and red from missing Ruby horribly already and knowing they would forever. Sidney, quiet and memorably sweet for a boy so often in want, was paled by this grief and the unsuspected disease that would take him young, and smart skinny John Paul, whose restless, insecure and angry energy would become his prime asset in life, felt drained by the end, slumped listlessly, and could cry no more.
The town was represented from high to low, the disaster spared no class or faith, cut into every neighborhood and congregation, spread sadness with an indifferent aim. The well dressed and stunned, the sincere in bibs and broken shoes, sat side by side and sang the hymns they had in common. Mrs. Glencross, with Ethan and Virginia accompanying, sat next to the Dunahews, a public gesture Alma would never forget, though Mr. Glencross remained at home, still in pain from burns he’d received trying to pull survivors out of the ruin.
Six pastors and the only priest in the region addressed the mourners, voices rising to be heard over the tidal disruption of sobs, cries, hallelujahs, and occasional shrieks. The service lasted more than four hours, time for many mourners to settle, their thoughts to stray from piety and remembrance, and when finally the crowd wandered outside onto the sidewalk, into the street, quite a few voices blamed the deaths on a colossal accident of unfathomable origin, a test from above, while others could be heard suggesting earthly causes or suspects, courses of action that might remedy some of the mysteries, names of those thugs or crazies or outsiders that belonged at the top of any list. There was anger crossed with grief and nowhere to turn for answers but to those six pastors and the only priest and gossip.
The state penitentiary squatted above the Missouri River, a brick monstrosity with high red walls and guard towers, cold and wet, hot and humid by season, mean in spirit all the time. Seen through iron bars the flowing river was a constant beckoning toward escape, but the river had a savage history and accounted for a host of resolute cons who’d drowned while briefly free and fleeing across the hungry brown water. Di
scipline inside the walls aped the medieval, with prisoners clubbed by guards or lashed at a whim—for making eye contact or not making eye contact, for slouching like a hoodlum or standing insolently straight, because they talked back or wouldn’t answer at all—bats on the head regularly applied to encourage order or unconsciousness. The seriously disobedient were hung from chains in a damp basement room, feet held inches from the floor, tortured slowly by gravity, and as joints began to sag free from sockets screams reached into the cells above and alerted all who might misbehave to the meticulous agony that awaited them downstairs. It was a general population of tush hogs from the hills and bullies from the avenues, asshole bandits and free-world queers, snitches who sweated fear in their brains and tier-bosses who dreamed plans for vast empires of vice that might be made if ever they walked unshackled in sunlight again. The pen was a famously brutal place that released more brutes than it received, and sent them home changed beyond easy understanding or tolerance. Jack rollers and bank robbers, pimps and yegg men, some ready killers, some ready enough, returned to their villages or clusters of tenements with bitterly gained knowledge of meanness and the hollowing at their core that allowed them to employ it in any way that felt good at the time, which was mostly right now, this minute, on the spot.
The Arbor Dance Hall occupied a huge open room (the building had originally been a yellow-brick dairy barn) above an automobile garage, the ground level a dim space for mechanical repairs, new tires, or for men to stand around jawing with other men. It was operated by a gent known as Freddy Poltz who’d been Walter “Plug” Reinemann once, a tough who’d made a few mistakes on the streets of St. Louis, done his time, and upon release picked himself a fresh name from among the graves of his mother’s family in Borromeo Cemetery. As Plug Reinemann he’d been muscle for Egan’s Rats, shadowing Willie Egan himself as various gangland spats erupted, Jellyroll Hogan getting greedy, the Green Ones or Cuckoos trying to expand, dagoes off the boat and stray Hoosiers agitating all over. In 1921 he’d been lighting a cigar at Fourteenth and Franklin when Willie was assassinated, falling and standing, falling and standing again, then falling flat as a cop rushed over and asked if he’d say who shot him, and between bursts of blood from his mouth Willie replied, “Naw, I’m a good sport.”
The Maid's Version Page 4
