by Ralph Bowden
*****
First light woke him. The first thing he saw, right where he’d left them, were his backpack, boots, and blanket. How he had missed them in the dark last night was still a mystery, but he wasn’t about to dwell on it now. Outside, the sun was up just enough to turn receding clouds pink. It would be a clear, cold day. Swooze was barely warm enough under his carpet, and reluctant to get out from under it, but he was thirsty and needed to look around for some clean rainwater to refill his empty water jug. His feet, though, were stiff and sore, worse than the night before, and the thought of pulling his probably still wet socks back on and stuffing his feet into his boots was something he couldn’t face. Maybe he’d explore a bit inside on the carpet first. There was the hall he’d noticed. He stepped along it and looked into the first office that opened off it.
The place wasn’t badly vandalized, probably because it was so far out in the country and pretty well fenced off. Most of the office furniture was gone, but a broken down chair still sat on the stained and faded carpet. A window looked out front on the weeds he’d pushed through last night. In the distance, probably almost a half a mile away by the road, he could make out the gate where he had come in.
The second and third offices were similar. The fourth, though, must have been the head honcho’s. It was bigger and had a window to the side as well as front. But the interesting thing about it was that someone was or had been living here. Whoever it was, probably a bum like Swooze, had left a sleeping bag that didn’t look too bad. The backpack was the kind with a frame, like serious hikers used. There was a pair of decent hiking boots, too, and an assortment of clothes – a jacket, folded underwear, even socks. Dry, clean socks! They looked real good. He tried on one of the boots. Maybe a little big, but that was okay. And in a cardboard box in the corner of the room was an assortment of canned food, a box of cereal, and a big bottle of juice. Cool! Beer or some hootch would have been better, but actual food was all right. Who was this guy, and where was he now? Where had he gone without his boots and jacket? Could Swooze get away with helping himself and sneaking off quickly?
That might be risky. The guy could be a hunter with a gun. Of course a hunter might only come out on weekends, and Swooze had the impression it was now Wednesday, or maybe Thursday. He looked closer at the sleeping bag. There was mouse poop on it, and some big old dead bugs, not squashed. It hadn’t been slept on for possibly a week or more. Still, the owner might show up at any time and be pissed to see Swooze carting off his stuff. Maybe it would be better to check out the area first. He would need to borrow the socks and boots for that, though.
He quickly put them on and headed back down the hall to where a door on the other side looked as if it might lead out into the plant. But it was locked. Swooze went back to the lobby, hid his stuff under his carpet blanket, grabbed his water bottle, went out the front door and headed right, through the wet weeds, around the plant building. It was cold. Swooze wished he had borrowed the jacket too, but this shouldn’t take long. He just needed to go around the plant quickly to make sure there was no easier, back route into it, no well-worn paths somebody might come along at any time, no camping trailer with a caretaker or guard living in it, that kind of thing. And he still needed water to drink. A nice clean puddle would do.
There wasn’t much on this side. Turning the corner, the blank concrete block wall continued with only some small windows well off the ground. Swooze was looking for a downspout from the roof that might still be running from last night’s rain, but there was nothing like that.
The back of the plant, though, had much more to look at. There were a couple of weird conical towers on legs high enough for a truck to run under. Big ducts from the plant back wall led to the tops. Probably sawdust collectors. Various other ventilation ducts exited the building, and pipes ran back to tanks. And finally, there was a downspout, emptying into a culvert. It was still dripping fast enough for Swooze to get a drink and fill his bottle.
Next to the downspout was a loading dock with various rusty old junk on it, probably stuff pulled out of the plant when it closed down. The two roll-up loading dock doors were down and locked.
So far, Swooze had seen no paths, dirt bike trails, matted down weeds, or anything that might suggest recent human activity. Rather, vines and brush were taking over everywhere as you would expect. The place hadn’t been shut down that long, judging from the overgrowth. Probably not more than three or four years.
He turned the corner beyond the loading dock and found a regular metal door standing open, probably the main employee entrance. He stepped inside and looked around at the cavernous interior of the old plant, where flexible sawdust pickup ducts dangled from a tangle of overhead beams, ducts, and pipes. The machines had all been moved out. Great big concrete floor. It seemed a shame that it wasn’t used for something. There were a few wet spots on the floor from roof leaks, but basically, the building wasn’t bad. With a little work, it could be turned into a great skating rink. Again, no sign of vandalism or any other human activity.
Rather than continue his search outside, Swooze went in and wandered around, finding the old locker room, bathrooms and showers, what had been a snack bar before the vending machines had been pulled out, an area with high shelves that looked as if it had been a warehouse for lumber or finished products, all the kind of typical industrial stuff Swooze remembered from when he’d worked briefly at the auto parts plant in Milwaukee. Trash barrels were mostly empty. Sinks and toilets in the bathrooms had been drained when the water was shut off. There were no signs of any activity since the place closed. This would be a cool spot to camp out for a while, if only he knew about the guy using the front corner office.
Swooze headed back toward the front, past offices probably used by people in maintenance, shipping and receiving, and so on. He found the main door between the plant and the administrative offices up front, the one he thought he’d found before in the hall. It had been locked on the hall side. But it opened easily enough now. He checked the hall-side handle. It wasn’t locked. Opening it from the plant side must have unlocked it.
He headed back down the hall to the big corner office, looking forward to some breakfast, since he’d checked the place out and found no one around to complain. But the office was empty. No sleeping bag, backpack, clothes, or food box. What the hell? This was the right office, wasn’t it? The windows looked out on what he remembered seeing before. The stuff must have been there earlier. He quickly checked the office next door, and there was the stuff, arranged just as he had seen it before in the corner office.
Was he having one of his spells again? Or was some wise guy jerking his chain? Moving stuff around, hiding it from him when he wasn’t looking?
Swooze was pissed. If some phantom of the factory was sneaking around here playing games with him, he must be crazier than a coot, and Swooze wasn’t going to worry about him. He knew about crazy people. Most of them were too screwed up to be dangerous. If this one was too timid to come out and show himself, well, fuck him.
He quickly put the jacket on, gathered up the sleeping bag and clothes and what cans and foodstuff he thought might fit, rolled everything into the backpack, hoisted it up and headed around to the lobby toward the main entrance. He was leaving.
Except that the main front entrance door, a big glass panel, was now shut. Firmly. Swooze shook it, to no effect. He couldn’t see a deadbolt or lock. Had it blown shut and been caught by something in the base hinge or the closer at the top? There was no question it had been open last night and earlier this morning. That’s where he’d been in and out a couple times.
He headed back down the hall to the offices. Surely some window would open. No. All sealed tight. Where was that broken chair he’d seen there before? Could he use it to smash out a window? No sign of it now. Well, there was still the plant back door he’d come in a few minutes ago. He found the door from the hall to the plant, went through and trotted back across the plant floor toward the corner door. Bu
t now it was shut and locked.
He was locked in. There was no question now about hallucinating. This door had been open and he had come in through it earlier, just as he had come in the open main front entrance last night. These facts were certain.
Swooze was now seriously pissed. He kicked at a pile of old rags and trash beside the door. It didn’t fall apart and scatter as easily as it should have. The light was poor, but Swooze looked closer and found he was seeing a half-decayed body, shriveled, but with raggy clothes and hair, and bare feet.
He couldn’t scream. He turned away and ran back to the hall door. It was now locked. The only windows back here in the plant were too high to reach. He looked around for something heavy, something he could use to smash down the door. But all loose stuff had been moved outside to the loading dock. He ran to the locker rooms, where he thought he remembered frosted casement windows that he might squeeze through.
There were two. Chicken wire was embedded in the glass, but the window locks and operator cranks worked! He opened both panels of one window, threw the backpack out and managed to squeeze through himself. It was a six foot drop to the ground. As Swooze reshouldered the backpack, he called out, “Screw you, motherfucker!” He headed around the plant to the driveway and ran through the weeds out toward the distant gate.
It didn’t seem to get any closer, though. The brushy land he ran through seemed to stretch away in front of him. He looked back, and found the old factory was as close as ever. He was conscious of his feet hurting and looked down and saw that he had his old boots on, and he wore no jacket. Reaching around to feel, the backpack was his old, damp, torn-up cloth model.
The Corinth
To some people, a certain special place is essential to their karmic comfort. My friend Harold Underwood was like that. His special place was the school/church we had both attended growing up.
Built by the county school system in 1930, it served as a two-room school for many years. The elementary classes, 1-6, were in the basement, and grades 7-12 were upstairs. Neither division ever had more than 20 students at any one time. There was a coal stove upstairs and another downstairs, a hand pump over the well outside, and a privy in the back corner of the lot.
A little group of country Baptists paid a nominal rent to the school board to use the building on Wednesday evenings and Sundays. They called it the Corinth Baptist Church, and by association, the school was informally known as the Corinth school, and the building itself simply as “The Corinth.”
Harold and I both had been going to the Church with our families for several years when we started first grade at the Corinth in 1940. We walked together the half mile (a little more for me) to school every morning and back every evening. We were the oldest in our respective families. As our siblings – my two little sisters and Harold’s three younger brothers – grew old enough to start school, they joined us.
I took on the role of time-keeper, first for Harold, and then also for our younger siblings. I would leave home on the dot at 7:16 and reach Harold’s by 7:22. Standing in the road out front, I would holler for Harold. “Come ON, Harold. We’ll be late.” Actually, I always built 5 minutes into the schedule to allow for his chronic slowness. He hadn’t learned to tell time until just a year before we started first grade, and never did seem to realize that it rolled on at a steady pace whether he did or not.
On Sunday mornings and most Wednesday evenings, my father would sweep out the pickup truck, load my family and Harold’s in, and drive us all to church. For weeks at a time, the Corinth was the only place Harold and I traveled to. Especially in the early years, while WWII was raging, we had little first-hand experience with the outside world.
We weren’t aware of our restricted life, however. We had a radio, and got a weekly newspaper to supplement our education. We did what kids always did at the time: chase around outside, climb trees, tease, fight and get into trouble, shirk chores, and so on. In the fall and spring, we did a lot of this after school in the school/churchyard with the other kids and away from parents who might demand homework or chores. Harold was always the last to leave. He spent more time in and around that place than the rest of us. Even on Saturdays, he would often try to get me to go with him to the Corinth. He seemed drawn to it, as if that’s where all life was.
One Saturday – I guess we were 9 or 10 – he went to the building by himself. I had other things to do, and wouldn’t go. About an hour later he showed up where I was working on my bike, trying to patch an inner tube. He was breathless and sounded conspiratorial.
“Hey, I found a window that’s not shut tight and locked,” he said. “We could get in!”
“So? Don’t we spend enough time in there as it is? We’ve got Sunday school and church there tomorrow.”
There wasn’t anything in the building that I cared about or hadn’t seen, but Harold was motivated. “Come on, we could hide Miss Swarth’s paddle! Or listen to Mr. Jackson’s records.” Miss Swarth was our downstairs teacher, who occasionally wielded her instrument of corporal punishment – once, the year before, on Harold himself. Mr. Jackson, the upstairs teacher, played records of popular crooners and jazz bands to his students during recess when they couldn’t go out because it was raining or too cold. I think it was his way of fulfilling the music education requirement. The records weren’t anything that excited me or Harold either, so far as I know, but the adventure of breaking into the locked Corinth on a Saturday had grabbed him. I went along, bringing my father’s tire iron to help pry the window open.
It was a basement window and inside of some bushes, so we could open it and crawl in without being seen. Once inside, I was nervous, and anxious to be out and gone again as soon as possible, but Harold wasn’t satisfied to hide Mrs. Swarth’s paddle or play a couple records. He wanted to dig into everything. After 40 minutes, I couldn’t take the tension. I showed Harold how to put the window back down the way we’d found it and left, relaxing only after I was well away from the place.
Several hours later that afternoon, Harold showed up in my yard again. He was pale and trembling. “The window broke as I was putting it down. Glass all over inside. She’ll know!” He was referring to Miss Swarth, whose paddle we had secreted away in the back of the coat closet upstairs.
“But they won’t know who,” I pointed out. “Nobody saw you, did they? All you have to do is find a way to put the paddle back tomorrow morning before Sunday school.”
“I hid her grade book upstairs in the pulpit. A joke, you know. On Brother Caleb too.”
There was no chance of retrieving and returning that without being seen.
“Harold, you jerk!”
“You won’t tell, will you?”
I didn’t. We were vigorously interrogated by both teachers – Mr. Jackson had noticed his records were out of order – and by Brother Caleb and one of the deacons. I denied any knowledge, lying for Harold’s sake. But he broke down utterly into a blubbering puddle of guilt, part of it because he was lying to save me. His punishment was to confess publically, before the congregation and the combined school divisions, the error of his ways.
Harold went through other emotional traumas associated with the Corinth. He wasn’t the greatest student, and after we moved upstairs, Mr. Jackson threatened to hold him back between 7th and 8th grade unless he shaped up. The fear of flunking 7th grade really grabbed him and threatened his self image. He tried. I helped him with his studies as much as I could, and he moved up into 8th grade with me and one other kid, Molly Smith.
Two years later, Harold, like me, began to turn onto girls. There wasn’t much of a field to choose from in our school, where the total upper division included about 12 girls, spread out over 6 grades. Molly was just too gross. Her big sister, Susan Smith, and Christine Bowen were attractive enough to stir boy urges and fantasies, but they were both a year ahead of us, and so probably out of reach. Harold was desperate, though, and managed to convince himself that poor Alice Jackson, in the grade behind us, would turn
out to be a real doll when she developed some. She was still completely shapeless, but at least as desperate as Harold, and as soon as he showed her the slightest interest – by teasing her about her bobbed haircut and trying to steal the peach her mother had packed – she launched an aggressive attack. Harold was totally thrown off guard when she managed to maneuver him into some bushes and tried to kiss him. He told me all about it as we walked home after school, all the intimate details about how she still tasted like the peach and smelled like something he didn’t recognize. “And her mouth was wet, you know, and sort of cold like a dog’s nose. Of course it wasn’t very warm out, and I was probably cold too. But her body was hot enough, and I think she actually does have some titties. I could feel them when she pressed against me. How do I know when I can get away with feeling her up?”
As if I was an expert. “It sounds like she’s pretty horny and ready any time. You ought to wait for a day when your hands aren’t freezing, though.”
I heard all about Harold’s adventures with Alice for a few days until she must have decided he wasn’t worth her efforts. Again, he was clueless. And crushed. “Was it something I did wrong? She was pushing her tongue in my mouth and I sort of bit it, I think. She was still breathing hard, but that stopped the kissing. And then this morning she wouldn’t even look at me.”
Harold had other amorous adventures, later, with Martha Grogan, in the same grade as Alice. She wasn’t nearly as assertive, but communicated better and taught Harold a lot about girls and other stuff. I got it all second hand from him. My own adventures in the girl department were mostly with a cousin of mine who came to live with us for a few months when her mother got sick. She didn’t go to school with Harold and me.
Harold had no life apart from the Corinth. While his school work was barely adequate, he was pretty good at memorizing Bible verses and won a couple prizes right before he was saved and baptized, between his junior and senior years, in the creek right beside the church. The whole experience for Harold was indeed transformational, as it’s supposed to be. His senior year, he swore off girls and cleaned up his language, dropping words that Martha had taught him. I was the slow one in church, and held off the spirit for another year.
We graduated together. I got a part-time job at a farm supply store down town and took classes at the trade school in construction. I bought an old Dodge for $15 to commute. For the summer and fall, Harold worked at a sawmill just up the road. Then he enrolled in the nearby state university in the spring term. I say ‘nearby,’ but it was actually 23 miles away. He bought an old bomb of a Ford and commuted to classes, taking education courses. Almost every evening he would come over for me to tinker with his car to keep it running. Harold had no skills at all with tools and machines, but he was enthusiastic about his courses, which surprised me. I didn’t understand at first.
“You’re taking what? ‘Classroom methodology?’ What the heck is that?”
“You have to know how to keep order before you can teach them anything. These days, you can’t just use the paddle, like Miss Swarth.”
“I wonder how long the old bat will hang in there?” I said.
“Long enough for me to replace her, I hope.”
“You really want to be a teacher, Harold?”
“That’s the plan. And with any luck, I’ll take over at the Corinth. It’d be great. I could live at home and walk to school.”
Living at home was an anti-dream for me. I couldn’t wait to leave. But Harold wanted to come right back to where he’d grown up and continue with as many of the routines as he could. He was faithful with his family at the Corinth Church every Sunday, and even volunteered to teach Sunday School to the little kids. He dropped in to visit Miss Swarth and Mr. Jackson often.
Harold’s plan worked. He did his practice teaching with Miss Swarth and got certified. He’d already arranged things with Miss Swarth, who wanted to retire. She wrote him a glowing recommendation, and the school board hired him to take over the lower grades at the Corinth school. I had an apartment downtown by then and only came home sometimes on weekends. When I did, I found Harold happy as a clam, living at home. He told me all about his students, their personalities and difficulties. The school and church were his life.
But then Harold’s dream began to fall apart. At the end of his second year teaching, the school board decided to close the school and bus the few remaining children into town. The board offered to sell the property to the Corinth Baptist Church, but their members had been aging and dying until Harold’s family were most of the congregation each Sunday. There was no way the church could buy or take on the responsibility for the building.
Harold was devastated. “What am I going to do?” he asked me. “The place is part of my soul! I was brought up, saved, and Baptized there.”
“So was I, Harold, but it’s time to move on. The old dump is falling down, isn’t it?”
That didn’t matter to Harold. He tried all summer to keep the church going, even preaching some Sundays himself – he was a deacon now – and leading the Wednesday night prayer meeting. But it was hopeless. When the school board announced they would put the place up for auction in September, Harold was frantic. He pleaded with them to wait while he scrounged up a down payment on the original asking price and found a bank that would take the mortgage. He bought the place, closing October 1.
I was working for the county as a codes enforcer when Harold bought the Corinth building. I hadn’t seen him for a couple months when he appeared at my office door with the news. My first words were, “What for?” Actually, I said some introductory words questioning his sanity, but “What for?” was the real issue. “You can’t use it for anything the way it is. It wouldn’t meet requirements for any occupancy.”
I don’t think Harold had thought yet about what he would do with the Corinth, but, stung by my attitude, he announced that he intended to personally upgrade and remodel the place, and live there himself. I doubted that Harold could do anything of the kind. He had never shown any hands-on aptitude. But I agreed to help him get started.
We went out there together two days later. I spotted all kinds of problems. Even Harold could see that the building needed major repairs. The roof was in bad shape. Many of the old wood window frames were rotten around the edges where they met the brick veneer. The chimney mortar had disintegrated and the bricks above the roof were just sitting there. A few had blown down. There was evidence of extensive termite damage to the sills and joists. There was no indoor plumbing, and the electrical service was out of date and inadequate. The old coal stoves were rusted through and unsafe.
More puzzling was the school board’s survey. The property, of about an acre, was clearly bounded on the frontage side by a country road. A creek bounded the property on another side. Well-established fences bounded the property on the remaining two sides. The fences were obviously old, and good surveying practice would normally have been to recognize them, the road, and the creek as the property boundaries.
For some reason, however, the surveyor’s ribbons and stakes were way off. It looked as if the property was isolated from the creek. Most of the creek-side yard and part of the driveway was cut off. Most importantly, the water well that had served the church and schoolhouse for thirty years, was now about a foot outside the church property. Harold had the surveyor’s plat, but he hadn’t looked at it when buying the church because everybody knew where the boundaries were and always had been.
“Something’s wrong, here, Harold,” I pointed out. “You’ve got to talk to the surveyor and your neighbor.”
A week later, Harold stopped by my office again with the whole story.
“I called the surveyor, Jack Osander. He told me that it was Vernon Jones’ fault. You remember him. He owns the farm around the Corinth. Old Vernon was real friendly at first. He and Jack sat down and Vernon brought out his jug and they had a fine time swapping stories. But when it came time to survey the property, Vernon got real ornery and brought alon
g his shotgun. He insisted that his father, who originally donated the land to the school board, had stepped off the tract with the head of the school board. It was not to include the yard on the creek side. According to Vernon, the school board and the church had quietly pushed out the boundary to the creek just after Vernon went to jail for bootlegging and his father died. But Vernon had gone to school at the Corinth in the early days and remembered where the original boundaries were. He insisted that’s where Jack put them.”
“Harold, you know what an old drunk Jack is and what a lying, grasping, cranky bastard Vernon Jones is. Of course he’d do that. You’re going to have to hire an independent surveyor and have him go out there when Vernon’s away. Then you’ll have to hire a lawyer to file a deed of correction and get the school board to sign it.”
We agreed to meet out at the property again the next Saturday morning.
When I arrived at ten, Harold was outside frantically running around the old Church. He was so mad he could hardly talk.
“Look what they’ve done!” He screamed. “Windows shot out, bullet holes in the front door. . . . look here,” he pointed at the wood framing on one side of the door. “That’s a shotgun blast! And what’s this?!” Harold pointed at a new fence, half completed across his side yard.
I tried to calm down his raving without much luck. What stopped it was the sound of Vernon’s Jones’ tractor approaching, chugging along outside the new fence, towing a wagon with more fence fixins.
“Now just what is going on!?” Harold screamed at Vernon, who shut down his tractor.
“You got a problem?” he asked, just as snotty as could be.
“What’s this fence?!” Harold shouted.
“You don’t want my cows wandering over onto your property, do you?” Vernon sneered, pulling out his copy of the plat. Clearly, he intended to turn Harold’s side yard and driveway into grazing land, which meant that cows, with their flies and smells, would be 20 feet from Harold’s side door.
“What about my well?” Harold asked.
“My well, you mean? Pawpaw drilled it just before donating the property, and made sure it stayed on his side of the line.”
“But the school and church have always used it!” Harold screamed.
“Hey, I’m not charging you for that. That’s all in the past.” He glanced over at the building. “Why look there. Your windows are busted out.”
“Yeah, it’s all shot up! Windows, bullet holes in the door, buckshot all around!”
“There was a pack of wild dogs run through here last night,” Vernon said. “Already killed a couple goats at Uncle Silas’s up the road. Buncha boys was chasing them down. I told them to be careful.”
“Who? Give me names! I’m swearing out warrants!”
“Ain’t no telling where bullets are like to fly when you’re trying to gun down a pack. Go ahead, call in the sheriff. Nothing he can do.”
Harold looked like he was about to explode. If he’d had a gun, I know he would have shot his neighbor right there.
“Come on, Harold. We need to think this through.” I took his arm, which was trembling. At first he shook me off, but when I walked back to my county codes truck, he followed and got in the other side.
I counseled Harold on immediate, practical issues. I told him I knew Vernon was lying about the well because my Daddy had drilled it for the school board a year after the original transfer. I told him too he should clear anything valuable out of the building and store it in his father’s barn. Then, he should let me get him a job on a construction crew, both to learn something and to determine if that was indeed a new career calling.
“But what about the church? It won’t be worth anything if he puts up that fence.”
“You can’t stop him until you get a new survey.”
I also counseled Harold that he would have no end of troubles owning the Church under the circumstances, and that once the survey issue was cleared up, he should put it on the market.
“No! Huh uh. Absolutely not. That place is mine! It’s my moral duty.”
Harold took my advice on the survey. He hired another surveyor to do the job right, and by winter Harold had won, though it cost him – about as much as he made in the two months he lasted on my friend’s construction crew. He had to admit I was right there too; construction was not his calling.
He would not put the place on the market, though, and insisted on keeping up his mortgage payments. That meant he had to apply to the Board for another teaching job. They found him one mid year. It was down town, a seventeen mile commute in his old Ford. I tried to convince him to move in town to a duplex I knew about, but he insisted on living out at his parent’s place, so he could walk over to the Corinth in the evenings to check up on it. He had to be near that place.
The few times I saw Harold over the next two years, he looked glum. Nothing was going right. His mother was now bedridden and needed a lot of help. His younger brothers had left and his father was talking about selling the old place and moving in town where living would be easier. Teaching one grade in a regular school was no fun. The old Corinth, with nobody there, was falling apart. More and more windows were breaking or being shot out. Harold did his best to board and patch the place up, but his plywood fell off and the old roof leaked worse in each storm.
Then things started to pick up. Harold learned that Vernon had just died and someone outside the family had bought the farm. Harold looked the person up and found him genuinely neighborly. Harold started taking courses towards a degree in educational administration, aiming at a principalship somewhere.
In the spring of the second year after Harold bought the Corinth, he started dating, of all people, Alice, whose tongue he had bitten in the bushes beside the old school. She had graduated from college the year after Harold, and landed a good job as a book keeper. These were the mid 50s when new college graduates could be assured of opportunities, and were not saddled with debt. Alice never had filled out, was still desperate, and once again quite taken with Harold. She knew of, and was willing to accommodate, his fixation with the Corinth. She often went out to it with him and helped him patch, trim, and mow. They removed the fence and had picnics in the side yard, fished in the creek, and wandered around inside, remembering. Being saved still hadn’t completely worn off Harold, so I don’t think they did anything sinful there, though Alice probably tried.
In May of 1956, Harold and Alice announced their engagement. The wedding would have to take place at the Corinth Church. That was a given. Harold convinced old Brother Caleb to come out of retirement and do the honors. The church inside was now in sorry shape, though, so Alice insisted the ceremony should be in the side yard. The two of them worked like beavers to trim the bushes and cut the grass. It was a perfect June day, and the event, with big old poplars and sycamores shading the yard and the creek running by behind, was memorable. I stood with Harold, who was weeping like a kid along with his new bride. The fact that his marriage was being celebrated at the old Corinth church/school surely loosened his tears.
Harold’s mother and father moved to town soon after the wedding so Harold and Alice could live at his old home. Any other young couple would have thought of the Corinth as a millstone. Alice may have resented it sometimes, but was willing to keep quiet out of loyalty to Harold. It was certainly a big project for them over the next five or six years. Fortunately, Alice’s family had money, and her job paid well so they could afford to have the place gradually fixed up. I helped by pointing them to reputable tradesmen and contractors. Alice and Harold waited to start a family until they could move in to what had finally become a livable and unique dwelling. I was there when Harold, a newly appointed principal, carried in his first-born, followed by movers. Never was there a more radiant and satisfied look on any man’s face. His dream was fulfilled. His anchor was down for good.
“It’s roots,” he told me. “Other people do without them, but I can’t. Mine have been here for 20 years, and won’t let me go.�
�
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Author Notes
I’ve assembled three short story collections. The first, THE HITCHHIKERS, includes eight very different hitch hiking stories, all character- and situation-driven. The second, FIRST STORIES AND A VW BUS, is a self-indulgent little book of memoir fragments, with stories such as First Boat, First Date, First Career, and Volkswagen Bus, September, 1992 . PLACES, as you know if you’ve read this far, is a series of place-driven stories, where what happens is subservient to the place where it happens.
I typically write short stories while waiting for a new novel to ferment and bubble up (some would say ‘fester and ooze out.’). Once begun, the novel takes over and I can’t write anything else until I see how it turns out. At last count, 18 novels reside, largely unread, on my hard drive.
Like the stories in this collection, my novels are all quite different. While I have a whodunit, a romance, a murder mystery, and a couple that might be considered thrillers, most of my novels are sans or trans genre. They are simply long (in several cases over 100k words) stories. Place and environmental themes are prominent in several.
