Alida's Song

by Gary Paulsen

  ALSO BY GARY PAULSEN

  The Boy Who

  Owned the School

  Brian's Return

  Brian's Winter

  Call Me Francis Tucket

  Canoe Days (with Ruth Wright Paulsen)

  Canyons

  The Car

  The Cookcamp

  The Crossing

  Dogsong

  Dogteam (with Ruth Wright Paulsen)

  Father Water, Mother Woods:

  Essays on Fishing and Hunting

  in the North Woods

  The Foxman

  Harris and Me

  Hatchet

  The Haymeadow

  The Island

  Mr. Tucket

  The Monument

  My Life in Dog Years

  Nightjohn

  The Night the White Deer Died

  Popcorn Days and Buttermilk Nights

  Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers

  The River

  Sarny: A Life Remembered Dancing Carl

  The Schernoff Discoveries

  Sentries

  Soldier's Heart

  Tiltawhirl John

  Tracker

  The Transall Saga

  Tucket's Ride

  The Voyage of the Frog

  The Winter Room

  Woodsong

  Dedicated with all love

  to my grandmother and her song

  Homecoming

  So you came home to see your old grandma, “did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you are grown.”

  “Yes.”

  “And in the army.” She said it aaarmiie, in a teasing way.

  “Yes. I …”

  “And you are a man….”

  “I … think so. Maybe …”

  She stopped speaking for a moment then and smiled and clicked her false teeth and put a sugar lump to her coffee, held it until it had soaked through, then put it under her tongue and sucked on it while she studied him in silence.

  He looked around the small house where she lived with another old woman, named Florence. The family had hired Florence, who was in her seventies, to take care of his grandmother, who was a little older. But Florence was always “poorly,” or so his grandmother said, and in reality his grandmother wound up looking after Florence, cooking for her, cleaning up after her, and he thought that perhaps it was best that way. His grandmother always took care of people, as she had always taken care of him.

  “Are you happy?” The question was so sudden it startled him, and he did what he had always done with her sudden questions. He shrugged.

  “I guess so.”

  She knew instantly that it was a lie. “You don't like the army?”

  He shook his head. “No. I hate it. It was a terrible mistake to enlist.”

  “It will soon be over,” she said.

  “In three years.” His voice had the edge of a whine to it and he was disgusted with himself.

  She nodded. “Three years will go by like that.” She clapped her hands. “You'll see. Do you have a girlfriend?”

  He was still thinking about the army and about how three years did not seem like such a short time to him. He shook his head. “No. I don't know anybody.”

  She sighed. “You must find a girl and get married. It is the best thing for you—for a man—to be married.”

  He said nothing. He did not meet any girls, he thought, not women but girls—except in the places soldiers went to drink and find women, not girls but women, but he did not go to those places and had not yet begun to drink as he one day would. He knew no girls but the wives of sergeants in his unit and they were already married. He could have said that. He could have said lots of things, but he kept silent.

  “Are those your own teeth?” she asked.

  He nodded and didn't tell her of the back tooth kicked out by another recruit in a barracks fight during basic training.

  “Let me see.”

  He leaned forward and opened his mouth to show his teeth. How many times, how many hundreds of times, had she said softly, “Let me see,” to one thing or another, a cut, a bruise, a magic trick? And now, in that one act, he was no longer the man he thought he might be but was carried back to when he was just fourteen, just becoming a man.

  Chapter One

  At first the summer seemed to be much like other summers.

  Many things were normal. Not good, but normal. He had nearly flunked the eighth grade, barely squeaking by, getting passed, he felt, because they didn't want him around the same rooms for another year, just as he had nearly flunked the seventh grade and the sixth grade before it, getting passed on because they did not want him around.

  He still delivered newspapers in the morning and still sold newspapers in the bars at night, hustling the drunks for extra dimes and quarters when they weren't looking.

  Every night he went to the corner where Johnny delivered the papers wrapped in bundles and gathered forty papers. He went to the hospital first, working room to room until it was after nine. Then he went to the bars when the men and women would be too drunk to count their change very well.

  “Come on, Charley, give the kid a buck. You're such a big spender. Give the kid a buck.” And he—the kid—would smile in what he hoped was a winning way and look poor (not hard to do) and sometimes the drunk would listen to the woman and give him a buck. Considering he usually made only a nickel a paper in commission, a dollar represented twenty sales. With that and slipping extra change off the bar when they weren't looking, on a good night he might clear three or three and a half dollars—half a day's pay for a man working in a factory in those long-ago times.

  His folks were still drunk. That hadn't changed. They lived in what he thought of as a grubby apartment. He didn't think of himself as living there and he spent as little time as possible in the apartment. He would go back there when it was late and they were so drunk they had passed out. He would rifle his mother's purse and his father's pants and get perhaps two more dollars. They never knew how much he had taken because they were always in blackouts; once he'd found a twenty-dollar bill in his father's pocket and they didn't even know it was gone. Then he'd take a quart of milk, a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and another of grape jelly and head for the basement.

  He had a place down there. The furnace was in a dark cubicle, near the coal bin. He was in charge of the furnace. In the winter the landlord paid him three dollars a week to feed coal to the stove hopper and to carry the clinkers out in a metal tub and scatter them on the driveway.

  The furnace cubicle was his place, his own place, and he had found an old easy chair with the springs sticking through the cushion and dragged it back into the cubicle. There was a single bulb hanging from the ceiling on a twisted wire, a bulb with clear glass and a bare filament that was so bright it seemed like day when it was lit. He fashioned a shelf-table out of an old table-top he'd found and would sit down there for hours, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinking milk from the carton, trying to read (he read poorly) or making stick model airplanes. He relived the air war in the Second World War in the basement with the models—P-38s, B-17s, Corsairs, Zeros—that he painstakingly made of balsa wood and tissue paper. He hung them from the ceiling in the cubicle and when he needed room for new models he would take the old ones to the roof of the apartment building, sprinkle them with lighter fluid, light them and send them flying off into space to go down in flames.

  This was done with great solemnity, and the curving down of the plane as it glided and crashed mimicked the crashing he'd seen in movies and newsreels of planes going down in combat. He always felt compassion for what it must have been like to die that way. He heard that some pilots carried pistols so they could shoot themselves if their plan
e caught on fire and they couldn't get out, and sometimes when he felt as if his life was impossible and he couldn't get out he wished he had a pistol. Not always, but sometimes.

  He lived this way until it seemed to be all of his life. Usually he slept in the basement as well, though sometimes after his parents had passed out he would move back upstairs and sleep on the couch near the door—in case they awakened and he had to leave in a hurry. And he went upstairs to use the bathroom or shower.

  His day was nearly always the same. He had an old alarm clock with a little hammer that slapped back and forth against two bells so loudly that it could wake the dead. He rose at five, cleaned up, took his paper bag and walked the five blocks downtown to where Johnny brought the morning papers. He delivered subscription papers in the morning.

  On the way he went by Torku's Bakery. They'd just be finishing the first run of hot rolls and he would go to the back door in the alley and knock softly and Mrs. Torku, who ran the ovens, would come and slip him three hot rolls. It had started because he'd walked through the alley one winter morning and the smell of baking bread had stopped him as dead as if he'd been hit with a hammer. He'd stood there salivating for a moment, then gone to the door to smell it better, and a large woman, not fat but large, had seen him there and given him some rolls. That was Mrs. Torku. “Those will take the chill out of the air,” she said, and since then he'd stopped every morning to say hello and get hot rolls.

  He would eat one immediately—the pleasure of the first hot roll was almost religious—and save the other two in his jacket pockets for later, just before school.

  After the papers were delivered he would make his way to school, avoiding other children. He was almost terminally shy, especially with girls—doubly bad because he could not stop thinking of them—and had no real friends because of his home life and lack of social standing, and so he forgot most of what went on every day at school. Indeed, he often tried to forget it while it was happening, thinking, All right, this is happening now but I will forget it before tomorrow. He lived for weekends and holidays and summer, when he could be shed of all of it. Often he couldn't wait, but skipped school and either spent the day in the basement working on models, reading, or more often out in the woods near town hunting and fishing.

  When school was done for the day he went to the Four Seasons Cafe, where he cleaned out the kitchen and trash and was paid a dollar and— usually, if he smiled right—he would get a hamburger and a Coke, which constituted his supper.

  After that he would go to the bowling alley and set pins and then sell papers in the hospital and bars and back for the night to his basement hole, where he would work on the models or read.

  Summer would come with its usual slow, dragging gait—the last week of school seemed to take a year. At last they'd give him his report card, which he'd throw away, along with a note from his teacher saying he could have done better, and he'd settle into the normal summer routine. This was largely the same as the winter's, except that he would try to find farm work for the day as well as the evening, and he'd go fishing down by the power dam every chance he could get for fish to sell in the bars.

  This fourteenth summer started the same way and would have continued the same way except that in the first week after school was out he received a letter from his grandmother.

  Dear One,

  I am working now at the Nelson farm, cooking for two bachelor brothers named Gunnar and Olaf. They have fourteen cows and two hundred acres. They said they could use a boy for the summer. They said they would pay three dollars for each work day plus food and a bed on the porch. I have a quilt for you. You better come. It's a good job. Gunnar is coming down to Three Rivers next Tuesday for feed and will pick you up. I already told your mother you are coming. You better come so I can see you.

  Love, Alida

  Your Grandmother

  He thought first of what he would miss by going to work at the Nelson farm with his grandmother for the summer. Fishing, work—he'd have to have somebody take his paper route and clean at the restaurant—and … that, he thought, was that. The rest he wouldn't miss. He certainly wouldn't miss his parents, the fighting and drinking.

  He hadn't seen his grandmother since he was a small boy, and it would be nice to see her and in the end it was not as if he had much of a choice.

  It was his grandmother, after all, and during the war while his mother worked in munitions factories in Chicago and lived a wild life he had stayed with his grandmother up in northern Minnesota, and he thought of her more as a mother than his own mother.

  It would be like going home.

  Chapter Two

  Gunnar wore clean bib overalls and—in spite of the fact that it was June first—a denim coat with a checked flannel lining. He had a blue work shirt buttoned up to the collar, a straw hat with a green see-through visor, and plain glasses so thick his eyes expanded when he looked directly at the boy.

  “You are ready?” He had a cleft palate, a birth defect in the roof of his mouth, and spoke in stilted English—although later the boy would hear him swear with great depth and beautiful fluency in Norwegian when a workhorse stepped on his foot. Because of the birth defect Gunnar's words seemed to hum and sounded musical. “Uuuuuurrrrrreedddy?”

  The boy had been packed and ready for three days.

  Gunnar was driving an old pickup—a 1938 Ford—that looked as if somebody had taken a sledgehammer and dented every square inch of the body. The windshield was in two pieces, with a brace down the middle, and the glass on the passenger side was broken out.

  The boy put into the back of the truck a cardboard box containing some spare clothing, a model of a B-25 still in the box and a science fiction novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs called The Chessmen of Mars. He nestled the box into the corner of the bed behind the cab so it wouldn't blow away and began to climb into the passenger seat.

  “Do you drive in town?” Gunnar stood by the front of the truck and spoke through the broken windshield to the boy.

  It was a loaded question. He was not old enough to drive legally, but he had worked on farms for two years now in the summer and had driven tractors and farm trucks and knew how to shift and drive. He also secretly drove the family car—a 1951 Chevy coupe—around town at night when his parents were passed out. He had to put a pillow on the seat to see out of the windshield, but he would drive past Irene Peterson's darkened house with his window open and his elbow propped up and fantasize about picking her up and taking her to the drive-in movie.

  He shrugged. “Yes. I guess so.”

  “Good. You drive then. I am not so good at town driving. There are too many cars and too many signs. You have to think of everything.” Gunnar went to the passenger side and motioned the boy to slide over behind the wheel. “I do not like to think of everything.”

  Well, the boy thought, I hope we don't meet a cop. He turned the key on, slid the floor gear-shift into neutral and mashed the starter switch on the floor next to the accelerator pedal. The truck ground over four times and just when it seemed on the edge of dying completely Gunnar pulled the choke out and the engine started with a belch of blue smoke. There was a hole in the muffler right below the floorboards—which were literally old boards and had holes here and there—and the noise and smoke came up into the cab.

  “You need to choke her,” Gunnar said. “Every time you start her.”

  The boy pushed the clutch down and put the truck in gear. “Where are we going? I don't know where your farm is.”

  “We are going to Grant first. Do you know where Grant is?”

  The boy nodded. It was a small town—very small, with perhaps forty people—about twenty-18 five miles north of Three Rivers. He let the clutch out as he pushed his foot down on the gas, and the truck started to move.

  He was still accelerating at the corner, where he turned onto Eighth Street, which went to the highway that led north of town to Grant. It was straight through except that there was a signal about halfway to the highway�
��three blocks down—and as they approached the signal the light turned red and the boy put his foot on the brake pedal.

  It slammed to the floorboards without stopping. He pumped it as fast as he could but with no result. It just kept bouncing off the floor. “There are no brakes!” he shouted.

  Gunnar nodded. “That is a thing I forgot to tell you. The brakes do not work. It had a set of cables to operate the brakes but a cable broke.”

  “But …” It was too late to say more. They were at the light and the boy looked right and left, saw cars coming—and a semitrailer—and he weaved left, then right, closing his eyes, and when he opened them the pickup was through the intersection.

  “I—”

  “Drivers will move,” Gunnar said, “if they have to move. They do not want to hit us.”

  The boy slowed the truck to little more than a crawl along the side of the road. “You drove all the way down here like this?”

  Gunnar nodded. “The cable broke as I was leaving. We needed the feed for the pigs and geese. I had to come.”

  “But we can't drive like this.”