Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  Herman grabbed for the sugar bowl with sudden purpose. “You know about ore boats any, Donny?”

  At the shake of my head, he instructed, “This is ore boat. Badger Voyager, pretend. Table is Great Lakes. Gee-oh-graphy lesson, hah?”

  Plotching a hand here and there across the tabletop, he named off the bodies of water—Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario—while I paid strict attention as if about to be called on in class.

  He steered the sugar bowl toward me. “Where you sit is Duluth. Full of iron mines. How it works, Badger Voyager comes, loads ore, takes it maybe here, maybe there”—he maneuvered the sugar bowl in winding routes to various ports of call, where he told me the ore was turned into steel, Chicago, Cleveland, all the way to Buffalo.

  Very instructive, yes, if you could make yourself interested in that kind of thing. “But what about—”

  “‘Dutch,’ yah. Coming to that.”

  He peered at the sugar bowl through his strong glasses as if encouraging me to have a close look, too. “He is on the ore boat, see. Me, I mean. Twenty years.” Pride shone out of him as he sat back, shoulders near square enough to burst out of his shirt. “A stoker I was.”

  I puzzled over that. Like stoking a stove? A cook’s helper, like I sometimes was in kitchen chores for Gram? He pawed away that supposition, explaining a stoker’s job in the boiler room of a ship. “Mountains of coal have I shoveled.”

  “But you don’t do that anymore,” I said, thinking of Aunt Kate’s mocking response when I’d asked about his job.

  “Hah, no. I am onshore, so ‘Dutch’ is no more. No shipmates to call me that. I change to ‘Herman,’ who I was before.”

  This was a whole lot more complicated than my Red Chief nickname coming and going at will, I could see. Still, something had been left out of the story, and my guarded silence must have told him I knew it had. Herman, who looked to me as if he could still stoke coal all day long if he wanted to, read my face with that unsettling cockeyed gaze. “The Kate did not blabber it to you? Something wrong. Her tongue must be tied up.”

  He sat back again and folded his arms as if putting away the hands that fit a coal shovel. “A settlement I have.”

  Thinking the word through, I took it apart enough to ask hesitantly, “Wh-what got settled? Like a fight?”

  “I show you.”

  He navigated the sugar bowl back to the Lake Superior territory of the table, then began wobbling it so drastically I thought it would spill.

  “Straits of Mackinaw,” he pronounced the word that is spelled Mackinac. For some moments, he didn’t say anything more, a tic working at the corner of his eye as if he had something in it, all the while staring at the imaginary piece of water. At last he said in a strained voice: “Bad place any old time. Bad and then some, when Witch of November comes.”

  Another one of those? One more Great Spirit of Gitche Gumee or whatever, I didn’t need. My skin was starting to crawl again.

  All seriousness, he cupped his hands around the sugar bowl as if protecting it. “Witch of November is big storm. Guess what time of year.”

  He drew a breath as if girding himself for that mean-sounding storm. “When Witch of November comes, you are on the boat, no place to go”—opening his hands to expose the fragile sugar bowl—“and waves big like hills hitting the deck, send you over the side if you don’t hang on hard as you can. Drown you like a kitten katten in a bag, it will.”

  That description did make quite a bit of an impression, I had to admit. But we still weren’t anywhere near how the name Dutch went down with the ship and Herman was sitting here big as life. Maybe I was being a sucker, but I said, “Go on.”

  “Night of thirtieth of November, Badger Voyager gets to Straits of Mackinac,” his voice growing husky as he maneuvered the sugar bowl. “We feel lucky, no Witch that year, nineteen and forty-seven. Then it starts storming, middle of night—Witch of November saving up all month, hah? Worst I was in, ever. Lost an old friend, the bosun.” Teeth clenched, he girded himself again for telling this. “We sailed together maybe hundred times on the Lakes. This time, bad luck is with him. One minute he is giving orders like ever, and the next, the Witch takes him in biggest wave yet and he is gone.” Sugar shook from the bowl, he quivered it so hard. “After that, the Badger Voyager sinked, like I say. Big waves broke her in half.” He lifted his hands and mimicked snapping a branch.

  You can bet I was on the edge of my chair for the next part. “Raining and wind blowing like anything when order comes, ‘Abandon ship.’” He continued slowly, as if retelling it to himself to make sure he got it right. “I go to climb in the lifeboat, and a pulley swings loose from the davit and hits me, like so.”

  All too graphically, he clapped a hand over his left eye and I couldn’t help recoiling in horror.

  “Hits ‘Dutch,’ yah?” he made sure I was following all the way. Now he removed his glasses, set them aside, and took the spoon out of the sugar bowl. Reaching up to his left eye with his free hand, he held his eyelids apart. My own eyes bugged as he lightly tapped his eyeball with the spoon handle, plink plinkety-plink-plink plink-plink distinct as anything.

  Immediately enthralled, I let loose with “Holy wow, doesn’t that hurt at all?”

  Grinning and even winking with that false eye, he shook his head.

  “Herman, that’s out the far end!” The squint of his good eye questioned me. “That’s soldier talk, it means something is really something! Can you do it again?”

  He obliged, this time with the recognizable rhythm of Hap-py birth-day to you. I couldn’t get over the stunt; the carnival sideshow that set up camp in Gros Ventre at rodeo time didn’t have tricks nearly as good as playing shave and a haircut, four bits and the birthday song and who knows what else on an eyesocket. Still overcome with enthusiasm, I pointed to its eyeball or whatever its substitute ought to be called. “What’s it made of?”

  “Glass,” he said with a half wink this time, donning the eyeglasses again. “Like a greenhouse of the head, hah? Only it grows this, from the ship company.” He rubbed his thumb and fingers together, which with a penniless pang I recognized meant money. “Dutch is name buried at sea,” he dropped his voice as if at a funeral. “Herman stays on land, no more Witches of November.”

  • • •

  THAT WAS HERMAN in the ways most meaningful that first adventurous day, or so I thought. I can’t really say a glass eye sold me on spending a stifling summer in Wisconsin, but he did make things more interesting than expected.

  Aunt Kate was another matter, a sizable one in every way. After the morning’s catastrophe with my money and our general lack of meeting of minds—if she even credited me with one—I didn’t know what I was going to be up against when she returned from canasta, but suspected it probably would not be good.

  So when Herman went off for a nap—“Shut-eye is good for the digestion”—I figured I had better show some progress on the jigsaw puzzle. Spilling out the pieces that half covered the card table and sorting the ones of different colors with my finger, I had quite a stretch of the sky-blue top edge fitted into place, strategy recalled from having done the damn thing before, working my way down onto George Washington’s acre of forehead, when I heard the DeSoto groaning up the driveway and then Aunt Kate’s clickety high heels on the kitchen floor, instantly stilled when she reached the plush living room rug.

  “Yoo hoo,” she called as she swung through on her way to hang up her purse in the sewing room, as if I wasn’t just across the room from her.

  “Yeah, hi.” Figuring it couldn’t hurt, could help, I tried a slight initiative that might be construed as politeness. “How was the, uh, card party?”

  “A disaster,” she moaned, flinging a hand to the vicinity of her heart. “It ruins the whole summer. Of all the bad luck, why, why, why did this have to happen on top of everything else?”

 
Continuing the drama, she dropped heavily into the recliner beneath the Manitowoc sampler, whipped around to face me where I was stationed at the card table, and cranked the chair back until she was nearly sprawling flat. In the same stricken voice, she addressed the ceiling as much as she did me: “It’s enough to make a person wonder what gets into people.”

  Apprehensively listening, a piece of George Washington in my hand, I contributed, “What happened? Didn’t you win?”

  Now she lifted her head enough to sight on me through the big V of her bosom. “It’s ever so much worse than that,” she went on in the same tragic voice. “Years and years now, the four of us have had our get-together to play canasta and treat ourselves to a little snack. Religiously,” she spiked on for emphasis, “every Monday. It starts the week off on a high note.”

  To think, Kate Smith might have uttered those exact last couple of words. But this decidedly was not America’s favorite songstress, with me as the only audience trying to take in what kind of catastrophe a dumb card game could be.

  “And now, can you believe it, Minnie Zettel is going off on a long visit,” Aunt Kate mourned. “Why anyone would go gadding off to Saint Louis in the summertime, I do not know. She will melt down until there is nothing left of her but toenails and shoe polish, and it will serve her right.”

  Her chins quivered in sorrow or anger, I couldn’t tell which, but maybe both—they were double chins, after all—as she fumed, “The other girls and I are beside ourselves with her for leaving us in the lurch.”

  Having been beside herself with me not that many hours ago, she was having quite a day of it, all right. Getting left in the lurch seemed pretty bad, whatever it meant. I made the sound you make in your throat to let someone know they have a sympathetic audience, but maybe I didn’t do it sufficiently. Still flat in the recliner, Aunt Kate blew exasperation to the ceiling, wobbled her head as if coming to, and then her sorrowful eyes found me again, regarding me narrowly through that divide of her chest.

  “Donal,” she startled me by actually using my name, which I think was a first time ever, “do you play cards?”

  “Only pitch, a real little bit,” I said very, very carefully. All I needed was gambling added to the rest of my reputation with her. “Gram and me at night sometimes when there’s nothing on the radio but preachers in Canada.”

  “Mmm, I thought so.” She mustered the strength to nod her head. “When we were girls, Dorie was always one to haul out a deck of cards when nothing else was doing. I must have caught it from her.”

  That’d be about the only thing she and Gram were alike in, I morosely thought to myself, minding my manners by nodding along in what I took to be her bid for sympathy while I kept at the jigsaw, nine hundred and fifty or so pieces to go, when all at once she swelled up and exhaled in relief.

  “Good. Then you can learn canasta and fill in for Minnie.”

  I don’t know if my hair stood straight on end at that or what.

  Aunt Kate busily began dismissing my swarm of doubts before I could sputter them out, cranking her chairback higher with every burst of sentence. “There’s no way around it, we need a fourth for canasta and that’s that.”

  Upright in the chair by now and facing me dead-on, she manufactured a sort of smile. “You needn’t look so alarmed, kitten. I’ll teach you the ins and outs of the game. We have an entire week for you to learn, isn’t that lucky? It will help take your mind off your imagination, mmm?”

  Still speechless, I tried to think how to head her off in more ways than one as she heaved herself out of the recliner and quickstepped over to me. “Now then. It’s too bad, but we need the card table.”

  Before I could come out of my stupor, she was crumbling the sky-blue edge and George Washington’s forehead and scooping the pieces along with the rest of the puzzle into its box. “Don’t worry, child, you can start over on it once you’ve learned canasta.”

  12.

  THE PUZZLE PIECES were barely settled in the box before Aunt Kate was pulling up across the table from me and had the cards flying as she dealt a stream to each of us and to our absent opponents. Herta and Gerda—even their names sounded mean. Helplessly watching her deliver the valentines, as the poker game regulars in the Double W bunkhouse termed it, I felt unsure of myself but all too certain that turning me into a Minnie Zettel for hen parties was going to test the limits of both of us. And this was before I had any inkling that a contest of hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades could become such a dangerous game.

  While she was rifling the cards out, Herman wandered by the living room and took a peek at what was happening, which sent his eyebrows way up and quickened his step until he was safely past and out the back door. No rescue from that direction, so I cussed silently and kept stuffing cards into my overloaded hand.

  Finishing dealing with a flourish, Aunt Kate slapped the deck down squarely in the middle of the table and sang out, “Now then, honeybun, the first thing is, you have to catch up a weensy bit by learning a few rules, mmm?”

  • • •

  THAT BEGAN a spell of time when the high point of my days was the sugar on my cereal.

  Far from being the adventure I had been so excited about when I was met at the bus station by the living image of Kate Smith, my Wisconsin summer bogged down into the same old things day after day. Afternoons were canasta, canasta, canasta, and mornings veered from boredom when, after getting up hours earlier than anyone else and doctoring some puffed rice with enough spoonfuls of the white stuff, all I could find to do was to hole up in the living room reading an old National Geographic brought down from the attic, until the time came to tread carefully around the first of the battles of the Brinker household. Every day, Aunt Kate and Herman had a fight to go with breakfast. Generally it was her to start things off with a bang. “Can’t you quit that?” Her first salvo would make me jump, even though it was not aimed at me. “It’s childish and a nasty habit, how many times do I have to tell you?”

  “Is not,” he would pop right back. “Toast is made for such things.”

  “That is absolutely ridiculous. Why can’t you just eat?”

  “Hah. It goes in my mouth, same as you push it in yours.”

  “It is not the same! Oh, you’re impossible.”

  The one constant in the repeated quarrels was Aunt Kate holding her ground in the kitchen, while Herman retreated elsewhere, waiting to scrap over toast scraps another breakfast time. Eventually, when it sounded safe, I would abandon the green leather couch and National Geographic—even the attractions of people pretty close to naked in “Bali and Points East” can hold a person only so long—and creep across the living room to peek into the kitchen. The remains of the daily toast war, which might still be sitting there at lunch or beyond, I could not figure out. Sometimes on what had to be Herman’s plate would be nothing but crusts, other times a pale blob of toast from the middle of a slice. In any case, I would face the inevitable and call out “Good morning” and she’d look around at me as if I’d sprung up out of the floor and ask, “Sleep well, honeykins?” and I’d lie and reply, “Like a charm,” and that was pretty much the level of conversation between us.

  I have to hand it to Aunt Kate, she was a marvel in her own way. To say she was set in her habits only scratches the surface. Regular as the ticks and tocks of the kitchen clock, she maintained her late start on the day, parked that way at the breakfast table, dawdling over the newspaper sensations and coffee refills, yawning and humming stray snatches of tunes, until at nine sharp she arose and clicked the radio on and one soap opera after another poured out, the perils of Ma Perkins and Stella Dallas and the others whom she worried along with at every devious plot turn.

  Needless to say, monotony was not my best mode. Herman’s, either, fortunately. During the soap opera marathon, he hid out in the greenhouse, where I sooner or later would join him so as not to have radio performers’ woes pi
led atop my own.

  “What do you know for sure, podner?” he would greet me, as no doubt one cowboy in a Karl May western would drawl to another.

  Actually not a bad question, because the one thing I was sure of was what a mystifying place Manitowoc was, from toast fights to smoky portrait sitters inhabiting greenhouse windows to Manitou walking around dead to the strange nature of the neighborhood. I mean, I seemed to be the only kid anywhere. As used as I was to being in grown-up company at the Double W, now I apparently was sentenced to it like solitary confinement, with the street deadly quiet, no cries of Annie-I-over or hide-and-seek or boys playing catch or girls jumping rope, nobody much making an appearance except a gray-haired man or woman here and there shuffling out to pick up the morning paper or position a lawn sprinkler. It made a person wonder, did every youngster in Wisconsin get shipped off to some dumb camp to hunt frogs?

  In any case, the sleepy neighborhood was getting to me, so I finally had to put the question to Herman as he fiddled with a cabbage plant. “Aren’t there any other kids around here at all?”

  “Like you?” I was pretty sure I heard a note of amusement in that, but he soon enough answered me seriously. “Hah uh, kids there are not. The Schroeders on the corner got boys, but they’re older than you and don’t do nothing but chase girls.” Taking the stogie out of his mouth, so as not to spew ashes on the cabbage leaves, he shook his head. “Except them, this is all old folks.”

  I still had a hard time believing it. “In this whole part of town? How come?”

  “Shipyard housing, all this. From when Manitowoc builds submarines in the war. The last one,” he said drily, I supposed to mark it off from the one going on in Korea. “People did not go away, after. Now we are long in the tooth,” he mused. He gave me a wink with his artificial eye. “Or ghosts.”

  That was that, one more time. I pulled out a fruit box and settled in while he went on currying the cabbages.

  Under the circumstances, with no other choice except Aunt Kate, hanging around with Herman in the greenhouse suited me well enough. Whenever he wasn’t pumping me about ranch life or telling me some tale out of Karl May’s squarehead version of the West, I was free to sit back and single out some family or man and woman in the photographic plates overhead, catching them on the back of my hand thanks to a sunbeam, and daydream about who they might have been, what their story was, the digest version of their lives. It made the time pass until lunch, when I’d snap out of my trance at Herman’s announcement, “The Kate will eat it all if we don’t get ourselfs in there.”