Making Piece

by Beth M. Howard

  Unlike my Crater Lake decision, my direction was immediate and certain this time. I didn’t spend the next miles vacillating about whether or not to make the detour. I had several hours to spare and I wanted to see this house. I slowed down, turned right and took the two-lane highway, winding through more farmland, to the tiny town of Eldon.

  Following the rest of the signs that marked the way, I steered my MINI through the sleepy, residential streets of Eldon, passing two bait shops, an appliance store, a tiny public library, a grain elevator and a city center approximately a half block long. I turned into the last street, passing the Living Hope Church with its white siding and blue neon cross, traveling along a block lined with a mix of well-kept and well-worn homes. There was a certain humble aesthetic about the architecture—so simple and unpretentious that some of the houses weren’t even houses, they were double-wide trailers. The tidy properties indicated that some Eldon folk were hardworking and conscientious. But there were also plenty of rusty cars and junk piled in a few yards, which showed some residents had a different kind of mindset.

  At the end of the long block, the road turned left and I entered the clearing of trees that separated the tourist destination from the town. Across from the visitors’ parking, sitting back from the road and slightly in the distance, I recognized it at once—the American Gothic House. Just like in the painting, it was the white, old-fashioned, adorable cottage with the churchlike second-story window beneath the peaked roof. It had a front porch and was surrounded by a giant grass lawn dotted with oak and pine trees and picnic tables. The place was just begging to have someone bake pie in it.

  I was smitten in the way I was when I met Marcus at Crater Lake. And smitten, as I had learned, could be a dangerous, life-changing word.

  I parked in front of the shiny new visitor center and, upon entering the lobby, I was greeted by an oversize reproduction of Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting, and then by a volunteer, Carleen, an elegant blonde in jeans, who offered to take my picture in front of the house. She suggested I first dress up in one of the free costumes. There was a rack of bib overalls, black suit jackets and calico pinafore dresses adorned with cameo pins at the collar. All costumes came in a range of sizes. Plus, there was a bucket full of pitchforks, so tourists could replicate the couple in the painting precisely.

  I dressed up as the woman by tying one of the calico smocks over the top of my shorts and T-shirt. I also grabbed a pitchfork. We walked outside to the concrete circle in front of the house that marked the place to stand and I struck the pose—solo.

  Afterward I walked through the museum, marveling at the display of all the painting’s clever parodies, from Newman’s Own packaging to Miss Piggy and Kermit, Barbie and Ken, Garfield and countless other magazine-cover interpretations depicting the American Gothic couple.

  It was here in the museum I learned that the couple in the painting was not a couple, but rather Grant Wood’s sister Nan and his dentist from Cedar Rapids, representing a labor-weary farmer and his spinster daughter. The pair had never modeled in front of the house, nor had they ever posed together. Wood had painted all three elements separately. Except the sister and dentist did finally stand side by side—for a photograph—in 1942, twelve years after they appeared in the painting. Their photo was on display in the lobby of the visitor center. Nan posed for another photograph, finally recreating her famous portrait in front of the little white cottage, when the house was named a National Historic Site in 1981.

  Considering I didn’t even know the house was so near my birthplace, it should have come as no surprise I knew none of these details about the painting, including the fact it was created in 1930 and that, no, it was not a work by Norman Rockwell.

  Grant Wood had come to Eldon—which back then was a thriving railroad town, sitting at the crossroads of two cross-country lines—for an art show hosted by his friend John Sharp’s mother. During his visit, John drove Grant around town and when they drove past the little white house, Grant said, “Stop the car! I want to sketch this.” He made a small pencil drawing, capturing the details of the unusual window—though if he had driven by today, he more likely would have just snapped a photo with his cell phone—and went back to his studio in Cedar Rapids to create the masterpiece. The occupants had seen him outside, drawing their home in his sketch pad. They were so flattered by the attention they cleaned house and washed all the curtains in anticipation of his return. But he never did come back to Eldon.

  Instead, he entered the painting in an art contest held by the Art Institute of Chicago, where it garnered third place, won prize money of $300 and sold for $300 to the Art Institute (where it remains on display today and is now worth millions). But Wood’s work didn’t receive all accolades. The portrait of the sullen father-daughter duo also took a whole lot of flak from Midwesterners for how he had stereotyped them with this seemingly negative portrayal.

  I went into the adjoining gift shop, where the museum curator, Molly Moser was unpacking a box of T-shirts. Molly was a young, bright-eyed woman with long brown hair, glasses and rosebud lips that rivaled Angelina Jolie’s. I had brushed up on my Grant Wood history, and then turned my focus to the curator, quizzing her on her background. What was this cute, brainy girl doing in this remote corner of the earth? She had just graduated from the University of Iowa, where she had studied art, museum studies and business. Running the American Gothic House Center was her first job out of college, and she used her free time to paint. Once she explained it, it made sense.

  Included in the museum display was a list of the house’s previous owners and, in more recent years, its renters. A schoolteacher had lived in the American Gothic House only two years earlier. That meant the house was modernized. I immediately began picturing myself living in it, this adorable white-washed cottage surrounded by acres of open, grassy space. With my curiosity piqued as to why the house was sitting empty, my questions to Molly began. “I read through the timeline of the house’s history,” I started. “Is the house for rent? How much? Who is the landlord? What is his number? Would he allow dogs? Can I see it? CAN I SEE IT NOW? PLEASE?”

  “Well, I do have to do my monthly inspection, so I suppose I could let you come with me,” she offered, though cautiously. The house was not open to the public. You could only stand in front of it, pitchfork in hand. My explanation that I was in Iowa to be a pie judge at the Iowa State Fair and was subsequently visiting my childhood homes might have given her reason to believe I was a safe bet. Or her rationale might have been that I was salivating so much over the house she was only trying to avoid my drool getting on her shirt. Molly knew I wasn’t going to leave until I gathered as much information as I could. So she let me in.

  It was yet another fork in the road, a path Molly offered, and one I hungrily chose.

  Before I could compute the repercussions of making this choice, I was inside the landmark house. The interior wasn’t quite as charming as the outside—the wood plank floors creaked and their wide cracks were filled with dust. The short but deep bathtub was full of cobwebs and dead flies and covered in a layer of mildew. The lifeless kitchen had cheap 1970s appliances, including an overhead light with a coiled fluorescent bulb and a dingy linoleum floor. I wasn’t deterred. I could see past the layers of its abandoned state to its full potential.

  We climbed a narrow, twisting staircase to the upstairs, where the low attic ceiling sloped at extreme angles. This house was not built for tall people. The second floor consisted of two small adjoining rooms and whatever charm the downstairs lacked was redeemed upstairs—and then some. The room at the top of the stairs was the smaller of the two and had a Gothic window that mirrored the front one. Outside the back window was a view of the big green lawn punctuated by a clothesline and a forest set farther back. I could picture it already: this place could be my writer’s retreat—and this is where my writing desk will go.

  We moved into the second room, the bedroom, where I stood looking out from behind the world-f
amous window. I pulled the lace curtain aside to get a better view of the lawn, the visitor center and the people posing for photos in the concrete circle. Could I really see myself living here? Strange as it would be to live in Iowa again, yes. Not just in Iowa, but in a tourist attraction in rural Iowa? Yes. Yes, I could. I felt that certainty in my belly, the same way I did when I met Marcus and had felt that pull to him. I knew it was right—even if I couldn’t explain it logically. And I would definitely have some explaining to do.

  I could still remember the protests from my mother when I told her I was moving to Germany to marry Marcus. “German men are chauvinistic and domineering. You don’t want to live in Germany.”

  It was the first time I stood up to her and even at the age of forty it took some coaching from my sister before I got up the courage to make my declaration of independence. “I’m sorry you don’t approve, but I love him and I’m going to marry him.”

  She wouldn’t be happy about me moving back to Iowa, especially since she had already been apartment hunting for me in L.A.—in her neighborhood. I could hear the new protests already.

  Not just from her, but from every one of my West Coast friends. “You don’t want to live in Iowa. What will you do in the winter?”

  My brain was calculating so fast, I already knew what I would do in the winter. I would drive back to L.A. with the dogs and stay in the RV, which I had left with my brother who was currently getting good use out of The Beast for his weekend surf trips. As for living in Iowa in general, I had been happy living in the Texas frontier town of Terlingua, whose population was 200, so Eldon, which was five times bigger, might even seem overcrowded.

  After I thanked Molly for the tour, I was on my cell phone calling the landlord, the administrator of the State Historical Society of Iowa. I asked him—begged him—to rent the house to me. I told him I would be coming back to Des Moines so we could meet in person and I would write him a check immediately. I happened to mention that I was staying with Meg, my friend from high school. When I told him her last name he said, “I know Meg. We served on the board of a foundation together. Well, in that case, the house is yours.”

  With this one phone call, life as I knew it ended. Again.

  CHAPTER

  24

  The moving truck arrived from Portland with all of our furniture—I still couldn’t claim it as just mine—on September 20. I was so caught up in the chaos of unloading I didn’t realize until two days later that the date was the seventh anniversary of our German wedding, when Marcus and I walked down the aisle of the thousand-year-old church in the Black Forest. Out of our three weddings, this was the date we chose to celebrate. Even as I hung my wedding dress in the upstairs closet of my new house, I still hadn’t remembered.

  The only date I remembered without fail was the nineteenth. Every month when that number showed up on the calendar, I marked how long it had been since Marcus died. At first I counted time in days, then weeks, months, then one year, and now one year and one month.

  While the movers carried box after box inside the house, the mayor of Eldon, Shirley Stacey, stopped by to drop off a slice of her homemade peach pie. It was such a large piece I planned to share it with Molly at the visitor center next door. But once I dug my fork into it, tasting the ripe peaches, their juice thickened perfectly with tapioca, the buttery crust flaking off onto the plate, I couldn’t stop. I devoured what must have been a quarter of a pie. Molly would never know.

  I first met Mayor Shirley two weeks earlier when I went down to City Hall to get the water and garbage accounts put into my name. I was standing at the glass window of City Clerk Carrie Teninty’s desk, talking to her about cutting my grass and helping me give the Gothic House a much-needed scouring. Eldon, I could already see, was a town of multitaskers, real doers. Carrie had been caring for the two-acre lawn of the American Gothic House for several years, driving her John Deere tractor over from her house on Friday afternoons. In between that, raising two kids along with their menagerie of pets, and working full-time at City Hall, she was also willing to give up a whole weekend to help me scrub the scum out of the bathtub, the mold out of the refrigerator and the cobwebs out of the corners.

  While Carrie and I made cleaning plans, her nine-year-old towheaded daughter, Chloe, was behind the window talking to a woman I assumed was her grandmother. The woman had heard me come in and walked around to the front of the window. A full-bodied blonde wearing a bright orange T-shirt that read “City of Eldon,” she held out her hand with manicured red nails to shake mine. “I’m Shirley, the mayor of Eldon,” she said. “I’ve got a pie shop picked out for you to rent. It’s right across the street.”

  I am not joking. Word had traveled quickly that a pie baker was moving into the American Gothic House and Shirley, in her determination to make improvements to her hometown, already had plans for me. “Nice to meet you, too,” I responded, laughing. “You don’t waste any time, do you?” I had been in Eldon all of forty-eight hours, I was sleeping on an air mattress I borrowed from Meg in Des Moines because my furniture hadn’t yet arrived, but what the hell. Why not go look at some Eldon real estate? A potential pie shop? “Sure, I’ll take a look,” I told her.

  We walked across the main artery that ran through town—also known as Main Street, Elm Street and Highway 16, depending on if you were a tourist, a resident or a truck driver. My prospective pie shop—sandwiched between the Eldon post office and the historic McHaffey Opera House, which was undergoing an interminable restoration project—had previously served as a tearoom. But once we got inside, it was obvious the tearoom had occupied the space ten or more years in the past. Currently it was being used as a dumping ground for the owner’s ex-girlfriend’s junk—a tattered, flea-infested sofa, stacks of dusty suitcases, boxes of yellowed books, lamps with torn shades. I couldn’t understand why anyone would buy a building on the main drag and use it as a storage unit when the town is ripe for development.

  In spite of the appeal of the pounded tin tiles on the ceiling and the huge bay window, my ability to see the potential in the place, the way I had immediately seen past the grime in the American Gothic House, was not working. And anyway, I needed to scrub my own home; I didn’t have the energy to take on someone else’s cleaning project on top of it. This was more than a cleaning project; it needed complete gutting. No matter how bad I might want to open a pie shop—or should I say, no matter how bad the mayor wanted me to open a pie shop—this was not a space where I could envision spending my days.

  “The rent is one dollar a month,” she said.

  “One dollar a month? Are you kidding me? That is tempting, but I’m sorry. I can’t take this on. It would be far too labor intensive and expensive to make this place work.”

  “But Eldon needs you.”

  “Yes, I can see that.” Eldon was a struggling, threadbare village, worn out and tattered like a favorite old quilt. It was probably polished and pretty in its earlier days with its row of red-and-brown brick townhouses, but it was dying a slow death in the wake of the railroad industry’s departure twenty years prior. The town boasted six sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places—including the library, the opera house and, of course, the American Gothic House—but without a hotel, a motel, let alone a grocery store or any shops besides the Opera House’s thrift store, it couldn’t attract the commerce needed to resuscitate its economy.

  Shirley, as the newly elected mayor, was working hard to infuse new life into the town, lobbying for new businesses and medical facilities, grant money and even publicity. If she thought it could help Eldon, she wrote the letters, made the phone calls, went to the meetings, served on the boards, put in the extra hours and didn’t rest until she got what she wanted—what Eldon needed. I could see the tornado force I was up against; she was a funnel cloud of determination tearing across the plains. How could I say no to someone who was trying to make the world—or at least her tiny rural town, where I now lived—a better place?

&nbs
p; As I stood there, overwhelmed by the building’s state of disrepair, I came up with another, better idea. I knew what I would do. “Don’t worry, Shirley. I’m going to sell pies. But just not downtown. I’m going to open a pie stand at the American Gothic House. That’s where all the tourists come, but there are no refreshments available. They can visit the museum, have their picture taken and then they can have a reason to stay longer. They can buy a slice of pie and sit at the picnic tables to eat it.”

  Opening a pie stand was a good compromise for someone of my mercurial nature. It wouldn’t take a lot of money, certainly not a bank loan, and I could limit my business hours to the weekends. I told my sister about the store for rent on Main Street. “It’s one dollar a month, but I would have to put a lot of money into it, plus buy all the equipment.”

  “Marcus would want you to use his money to invest in a pie shop,” she insisted.

  I had already thought about that in Portland and couldn’t pull the trigger. And now that I was in Iowa, it seemed prudent to get more settled into my new place before putting down an outlay of cash or make long-term commitments. But beyond that, my house was the cutest—and soon-to-be cleanest—building in town, my dogs were there happily free to roam in the yard, and it’s where I wanted to spend my time. My kitchen was small, but I could manage. I had made pies in the RV, so I knew space wasn’t the biggest concern. And I’ve always liked working from home. I could make pie in my pajamas. So pie stand it was.

  Behind the faded facade of this southeastern Iowa town, hidden beneath what I had first seen as decline and decay, was a community spirit shining brightly. What I learned in my first weeks in Eldon was how the appearance didn’t matter; the people did. Like with historic ruins in Europe that exuded an artistic beauty in the weathered brick and peeling paint, there was a rich culture inhabiting within. And that culture was turning up at my back door every day.