American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “Just try it,” dared Dewey, frostily. He buttoned his threat with a quick gulp of coffee. “It’s cold,” he pronounced.

  Through all this, Joanna had been sitting at the kitchen table, staring down at her own blackened biscuits. She’d been sitting as she always did, silently, painfully, wishing that the hard words would stop. But this morning Joanna would not remain silent. This morning Dewey and Florence Hurd’s adopted daughter did something she had never done before: she made a threat of her own. “If you don’t stop this, I’m going upstairs and cut off all my hair.”

  Joanna’s parents stared at her for a moment in awe. Then her mother said, “You will do no such thing.”

  “I will,” said Joanna. “Stop it, or I intend to cut off every strand.”

  Now it was her father’s turn to speak. “If you cut off even one filament of that beautiful hair of yours, Joanna, you will be swiftly and roundly punished. Do you hear me?”

  “She has ears,” said Florence. “She heard you.”

  “You can put down the goddamned frying pan now, Florence, unless you intend to use it, and then I’ll return in kind with enormous pleasure.”

  The husband and wife glared daggers at one another, while their abashed daughter reverted to her former plate-staring posture. Like a whale unexpectedly breaching the surface of the water and then submerging herself again, Joanna disappeared, dropping down, down, down into the depths of her customary depression.

  Dewey Hurd rose from the table, his look now redirected to the window across the room. “Talbot’s pulling in. Come with me, Joanna. I’ll spare you having to sit here and listen to your mother disparage me for the rest of the morning.”

  Talbot was a large man in his middle years. As was his sartorial wont, he wore a western hat and overalls over a flannel work shirt. He trimmed sheep the same way his father and grandfather had trimmed them: with hand shears. He was very good at his job—the best in the county. It was impossible not to nick the ewes now and then, but when the job was over, there were very few cuts upon the sheep he’d sheared that were not small and easily healed by the wool grease, which contained a natural antiseptic. Talbot explained this to Joanna as he trimmed. He was fond of the girl, who reminded him of his three daughters, each now grown and moved away.

  There had been three wet sheep and Talbot saw no need to return on another day after the fleeces had dried out. Nor would his busy schedule have even allowed it. “The wool can dry just as easily off the sheep as on.”

  “How much do you think we’ll get this year, Talbot?” asked Dewey as the professional shearer went about his business.

  “I’m guessing these ladies are good for about seven, maybe seven-and-half pounds a coat. That’s around 130 pounds all told. Not bad for the Shropshire-Hampshire cross and not bad at all for one of the smallest herds in the county. When are you going to decide to go all in as a sheep man, Hurd?”

  The question being largely rhetorical, Dewey shrugged. He liked keeping milch cows too.

  The sheep presently being trimmed was the smallest of the flock. Talbot had set her easily upon her rump on the shearing platform, holding her in place with his left knee and upper arms. Joanna watched, fascinated, as he worked his way down and out from the animal’s right ear, taking the coat off one piece at a time. Talbot was fast, but he was also good at holding the ewe still while keeping large sections of the wool intact.

  It took about three hours to get all the sheep sheared, and Talbot took a few extra minutes to help gather the wool pieces and tie them all up, inner side out, into tight balls with paper twine. Joanna assisted with this as well, though her interest lay, as it did each year, in making sure that the waiting lambs were properly reunited with their respective mothers. Stripped of their wool jackets, the ewes all looked alike to the worried, bleating young ones, each of whom had to wait until her mother, through diligent rump-sniffing, claimed her. This day’s reconciliation went smoother than in previous years and made Joanna think of her own birth mother and the fact that she would never have the chance to reunite with her. Instead, she was now fixed by law to a woman who, no doubt, loved her in her own way, and a father who showed affection often enough to keep her from hopping on the next freight train to try her luck elsewhere.

  Still, Joanna was far from happy and quite serious about her threat. Had her mother and father not already defied her request by keeping up their hostility toward one another in spite of her warning? Did they not believe her when she said that she would cut off all of her beautiful hair? And yet she didn’t want to be punished. The punishment would come out of anger, she had no doubt, and would be severe.

  Joanna watched from the window of the shed as Talbot trudged back to his truck. Her father had gone to take the bundles of dry wool to his own truck behind the barn. It was at this moment that an idea came to her. She tore away from the sheep shed, running as fast as she could to catch up with Talbot before he drove away. She succeeded in reaching him just as he was climbing into the cab.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “There’s something I’d like you to do for me,” she said, slightly breathless.

  “Something that you—” He faltered.

  Talbot knew that the Hurd household was a troubled one. He had spoken more than once with his equally sympathetic wife about how hard it must be for a child to have to grow up in such a noxious environment. He worried in that moment that the girl might be preparing to ask him if he would take her home with him—let his wife and him be her new parents. He had heard stranger requests.

  But this is not what Joanna sought. What she wanted was simply this: “Would you take your shears, please, Mr. Talbot, and cut off all my hair?”

  “Cut off—”

  “All of my hair.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I can’t do it myself. My parents have forbidden me. But they haven’t said that someone else couldn’t do it.”

  “Good God, Joanna. I can’t cut off your hair. Not unless your parents asked me to, and even then, it would be a crazy thing to cut human hair with these things. You take scissors to hair. Have you never been to a beauty parlor?”

  Joanna shook her head. “The last time my hair was cut I was just a little girl.” Joanna looked down. It would be difficult for her to say what needed to be said while she looked at him. “Mr. Talbot, they won’t stop. I’ve asked them to stop. I’ve told them what I will do if they don’t. But then they would punish me. They won’t punish me if you do it. They can’t. Cut it very short, please. I want them to know that it’s their hatred of one another that’s made me look this way—like, like Joan of Arc. Like Joanna of Arc!”

  “You want to martyr yourself to bring peace to your family.”

  Joanna nodded.

  There followed a long silence. The silence was broken by the sound of Mr. and Mrs. Hurd’s raised voices inside the farmhouse. Talbot watched what the anger-laced words did to the girl—how they made her flinch and shudder, made her retreat inside herself. He took out his shears.

  Over the phone that night, Dewey Hurd said he would have Talbot arrested.

  “You arrest me, Hurd, and you’ll have to find another shearer. Nobody in this county does as good a job as I do for the price that I charge. You’d be an ass and a fool to do it.”

  Dewey didn’t call the sheriff.

  Even stronger words were leveled against Joanna, who sat on the sofa in the front room of the simple stone house looking very much like Joanna of Arc but looking not saintly at all.

  “We told you that if you cut off your hair we’d have to punish you,” said Dewey. Florence nodded. It had been a long time since the two had been in full agreement about anything.

  “But I didn’t cut off my hair,” said Joanna matter-of-factly. “Mr. Talbot did it. You didn’t say that I couldn’t have someone else do it.”

  “But you knew the intent of our warning!” screamed Florence.

  “Yet that isn’t what you said. Yo
u should really try to be more specific in the future, Mother.”

  Florence Hurd wasn’t accustomed to such insolence from her daughter. For a moment she said nothing in response. Then through growing tears: “Just look at yourself. How in the world can we let you go to school on Monday looking like that?”

  “You made your bed,” said Joanna in a low, severe voice.

  The next night, after Mr. and Mrs. Hurd had had time to think and had time to talk with one another in this brief holiday from mutual hatred—to examine their feelings and actions toward one another and how these actions had affected their now embittered, bald-headed daughter—they sat the sixteen-year-old again upon the sofa to take up the matter, this time in softer, more conciliatory tones. Joanna wore a scarf, which had the effect of making her parents feel strange and guiltier still. Dewey spoke first. “We’ve decided not to punish you, because if taken to the letter of what we said to you, you didn’t cut off your long, lovely hair. Instead, you asked someone else to do it, and Talbot, the son of a bitch, has obliged you.”

  Now Florence Hurd spoke. “But let us be clear from this point forward, darling girl—and especially after your hair has grown out and you begin to resemble our beloved daughter again, and not some mannish aviatrix—that you are forbidden ever again not only to cut off your hair while still beneath the roof of this house, but to ask anyone else to do it for you.”

  Joanna nodded. It was a simple request and one that she vowed to keep.

  There was peace of a sort in the house for several months thereafter—all the time that Joanna’s tawny locks were growing by leaps and bounds from living on a farm and ingesting ample protein and other healthful nutrients at every meal. When the circumstantial truce inevitably ended and Mother and Father were back at each other’s throats with a vengeance that made up for lost time, Joanna once again weighed her options.

  There was a lice epidemic in the grammar school, and great platoons of young schoolchildren were being sent home to have their hair shorn and pediculicides applied. She could easily find a little boy who could rub his pretreated head against hers. She would not have to ask anyone to cut her hair; it would simply be done as a part of prescribed medical procedure.

  She had also heard of a female worker at one of the Chillicothe shoe factories who had gotten her hair caught in a leather strip-cutting machine and was thoroughly scalped. Should Joanna take this course, it would be the machine itself—a non-human entity—that would do the deed. Scalping seemed an extreme measure for Joanna’s purpose, but she remained open to the idea of it.

  Joanna Hurd had become a determined young woman.

  1938

  JIVING IN NEBRASKA

  Dear Miss Allie (Gator):

  Greetings from the great American plains, where it might be cold but boy are these cats playing hot! Goodman’s Carnegie gig beat it down, and the jitterbugs at Harvest Moon kept me swing-happy for days, but it ain’t just New York and L.A. where the cats are sending and the jitterbugs are flittercutting, and it ain’t just New York and L.A. where you and me and the rest of the whackies can watch all those boys and girls posing and pecking and grinding the apple. They’re sending here too, Allie. Right here in North Omaha.

  There’s a place here called the Dreamland Ballroom and they’ve got this cat, Lloyd Hunter, who formed his own band back in the mid-twenties, and this kid saxophonist Preston Love who lets it ride—oh my good woman, does he LET IT RIDE! And weekends, Allie, this joint is one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock jumpin’! Makes me a little ambivalent about coming back to New York, when everything I need is right here.

  Which is what we’ve got to talk about. The old man’s after me to hire on with the company he works for. He’s an insurance man with Mutual Benefit Health and Accident Company. Pop’s wacky for the insurance game but I never gave it much thought. Me, your favorite alligator, pushing a pencil all the livelong day? I guess it beats pushing a broom, not that pushing a broom’s an easy thing to do from a wheelchair. The old man’s laid down the law, though. His crippled son’s got to start pulling his own weight. The years of me living off Daddy’s dough in my ground-floor Greenwich Village rabbit warren have come to an abrupt end.

  I’m going to call you long distance on Sunday night and you be close to the phone, ya hear? You remember that question I popped a few weeks before I headed west to spend some time with the folks? Remember how I wouldn’t take your answer without giving you some time to think it over? Well, Allie, your Icky’s going to ask it again and now I need to know where you stand. Could you possibly see your way to spending the rest of your life with a hopelessly lovestruck one-legged future pencil-pusher here among the cornhuskers and the insurance actuaries and all of Father Flanagan’s orphaned delinquents? (You saw Boy’s Town with Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy last month? Flanagan’s place is right down the road. My parents always threatened to send me there if I didn’t keep my nose clean.)

  If your answer is yes, you’ll make me the happiest man on one leg. If your answer is no, Allie, and it’s maybe because you could never imagine yourself living anywhere but Swing Town, U.S.A., then I’ll just give the old man the brush-off (I’ve done it plenty of times before) and figure out some way to pull down a few simoleons of my own in the Big Apple. I don’t want you to have to support the two of us on your stenographer’s paycheck. It’s not that your Icky don’t got a head on his shoulders, right? And who knows just what might turn up?

  But I do think you could really like it here. The first night I got up the nerve to take myself up to the colored part of town (I like the chance to get out of the wheelchair and back on the crutches now and then), I could hear the Ballroom jump-jivin’ all the way down 24th Street. I thought I’d just stand out there on the sidewalk and let the music groove ’round my eardrums, but this colored cat, he taps me on the shoulder and asks if I want to come up. (Dreamland’s on the second floor.) So jive on this, baby: the guy carries me all the way up the stairs—just lifts me up like I was a sack of potatoes or something, with some other fella minding my crutches.

  I was the only white face in the joint, but that was copacetic. I get set up at a table, baby, and Basie and Goodman and all the rest of them New York cats, why, they got nothing on Omaha. These fellas rode me right out of this world, and Allie, honey, you have never seen such dancing—not at Roseland—maybe, just maybe at the Savoy. The band played hot all night and the jitterbugs were organ-grinding, Susie Q’ing, shagging and truckin’. They were peeling the apple like Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, and the whole room, it was airborne, baby!

  Now, I’m not saying this is the only reason you ought to be here in Omaha, but what I AM saying is we don’t have to give up why it was the two of us whackies got together in the first place. And sooner or later the whole country’s bound to go jitterbuggy, so I figure Omaha’s just as good a place as any to get swing, swang, swung.

  I’ll call you at eight o’clock your time.

  Your Icky

  Dear Icky,

  You got off the telephone in such a hurry, I felt like you didn’t give me the chance to fully explain myself. Like I said on the phone, Icky, I’m very fond of you. You brought me out of my shell, and I’m so grateful for that. And I never minded that you were a cripple. These days cripples can do almost anything. They can end up as President of the United States! But there’s one thing that you can’t do, and I can’t help myself, Icky—I want to dance. I just can’t sit still and watch everybody else cutting a rug any longer, knowing I’ve got a couple of perfectly good legs that I’m having a devil of a time keeping still these days. There’s this guy, Salvatore, whose been teaching me the moves. I’m getting pretty good. He nearly broke my neck with an over-the-head throw the other night, but I couldn’t pick a better way to sever my spine! (A little gallows humor, forgive me.) Of course it means I live a double life: oh-so-proper and terribly retiring stenographer by day—daredevil, flittercutting, apple-grinding daughter of Terpsichore by night. And oh, Icky, h
ow I’m loving it!

  You want me to do this, right? You wouldn’t want to bring me there and have to wait and wait and wait for all those white cornhusker kids to get wise to the jive. I’d go buggy, Icky, I surely would! And how would you feel having to watch me dancing with all those other guys every night anyway?

  Now here’s the thing I didn’t have the heart to tell you on the telephone last night: I’m not sure that I could ever love you the way you need to be loved. Gosh oh git-up, Icky, you know how fond I am of you, just like I said, but it’s more like a brother-sister kind of feeling if I can be perfectly honest with you. Fact is, I just couldn’t give myself 100% to somebody with one leg, to somebody who could never cut even one inch of that rug, and that’s just the plain truth. You can make me out to be the villainess in your heart if you have to, but I have to be honest. Maybe I’m selfish—well, of course I’m selfish—but don’t you think I’ve got a right to a few things too? And I’m getting to find out what kind of a dancer I’m going to be, and, Icky, I really think I’m going to be one hell of a jitterbug. I can just feel it. Because I feel the music, I’m in the groove, but not just with my soul. I’m swing-happy with my whole body, Whackie-poo!

  Take good care of yourself, and if you ever make it back to New York, come see me dance at Roseland. You’ll be very proud of me, I know you will.

  Your Allie

  Dear Laurence,

  I haven’t heard from you in several weeks, so I thought I’d write, since I don’t have the telephone number for your parents. (The long-distance operator says there isn’t a listed telephone number that goes with this address.) I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. I know I threw you for a loop. Write me when you have the chance and tell me how you’re doing.

  Vanessa

  Dear Vanessa,

  I’m sorry it has taken me so long to write. My parents wanted to go down to Florida for the holidays and I decided to join them. I don’t go to the Dreamland Ballroom anymore. It isn’t that I’m not welcome—there are actually more and more white people going there to hear the music—I just don’t feel like doing it anymore. Nowadays I listen to my parents’ favorite music programs on the radio: the NBC Symphony, the Voice of Firestone, and The Carnation Contented Hour. You wanted to know how I’m doing? I’m actually fairly contented myself. I met a swell girl in Florida, and we’ve been corresponding. She may come up to Omaha in the spring to see me, or I might go back to Florida, if the Mutual Benefit Health and Accident Company gives me a few days off.