“I figure you’re probably savable. So I’ll put up with you a while longer.” Cole looked up and smiled.
“So you think you can save me?”
“I can’t save anybody.”
“So you’re a preacher now? You gonna start tellin’ me all about baby Jesus in the bulrushes?”
“Nope.”
Ernie sat back down on the porch. He drank slowly from the dripping bottle. He turned his head ever so slightly and looked at Cole. “You believe in God?”
“There is an old saying. Never talk about religion or politics if you want to keep a friend.”
“We haven’t really got to politics yet, we were just talkin’ about your African brothers,” Ernie said sarcastically.
“And sisters,” Cole said flatly.
“Yeah, yeah. So do ya?”
“Believe in God? Yes.”
“Not me.”
“Why not?”
“Never did me no good. Never answered no prayer. He let my mother die screaming in pain. Ain’t nobody gonna be there, now or ever.”
“Ernie, what makes you so angry?”
“Who says I’m angry? You a shrink now?”
“Seems to me you’re mad at God, people of other races, college graduates, preachers, psychologists. Let’s see who else?”
“Smart ass newspapermen,” Ernie groaned.
“Alright. Who else?”
Ernie didn’t answer, but Cole knew. He figured it out the second day he was in Orvin. Ernie was angry at himself. He had the lowest self-esteem Cole ever saw. Nearly fifty years old, unmarried, lonely, worked at a sewer plant and no prospect of changing the things about his life he hated most.
“Who says I’m mad?” Ernie finally said, with a defensive grunt.
“You do, by the way you respond to things.”
“‘Cause I hate niggers?”
“Because you hate your life. You have a lot to live for Ernie. You’re healthy; you’re still young enough to enjoy life. You have a beautiful farm. A good job. Maybe it’s a little stinky, but a good job. Plenty of money, and you’re not all that ugly,” Cole said, giving a comic grimace. “You know what you remind me of?”
“Do tell,” Ernie sneered.
“Me. About two years ago.”
“The hell you say.” Cole had Ernie’s attention.
“I had given up. God gave me a second chance though. I really believe it. You need to look beyond Orvin, maybe. Start over or maybe just start. Sell out, quit, I don’t know, but change. You’re just going to sit and sour if you stay this course.”
“Move?”
“I did. I went from Chicago to San Francisco. Best thing I ever did.”
“The hell you say. What would I do?”
“What do you like? When you close your eyes, who are you?”
To Cole’s amazement Ernie closed his eyes. “I’m a sandwich guy. Like in Lawton, in a shop.”
“Then you should do it!”
“Where?”
“Where would you like to go?”
“I can’t do it here. Nobody would want to buy a sandwich from the sewer guy.”
“I did.”
“What do you mean?”
“The day I came to town. I bought a burger from you.” Cole threw his hand over his mouth in mock horror. “My God, you didn’t form the patty by hand did you!”
“No I...” Ernie began defensively.
“I’m kidding! Nobody cared about the burgers, nobody would care about sandwiches. If you have a good product, and a nice place, people will come.”
“I could see people. Talk to ‘em. Every day. Six days a week. People would come in and I could talk to ‘em.” Ernie was talking to himself now, not Cole. “A sandwich shop. Piled high with meat and stuff. I could have a clever name for the place. Maybe a cute girl from the high school to work the counter, bring the kids in. I could do it. If Pete can have a cafeteria and barbeque I can have a sandwich shop.”
“You could do it.”
“You really think so?” Ernie frowned.
“Why not?” Cole shrugged.
“What’s it take?”
“I don’t know. You have any money? It will take money for start up and to live on until it takes off. You have to fix a place up. Advertise a little to get the word out. You’ll need supplies, meat and cheese and bread, all that stuff. Napkins, plates or whatever.”
“I can’t do it. I could never remember all that.”
“Then make a list. Better yet, go to a sandwich shop you think is really cool and copy it.”
“Hell no! I’ll do my own thing, think up my own stuff.”
“There you go, see. I think you should do it and if it doesn’t work, what’s the worst thing that can happen?”
“Back to the shit farm.”
“But that won’t happen. You’re a great cook.”
Ernie stood at the bottom of the steps staring at Cole. He tapped his steel toed boot on the first step. He suddenly turned and went to his ATV. “I’ll see you later,” He said distractedly. In a moment he spun the little Honda around and disappeared around the corner of the house.
“The hell you say,” Cole said, with a chuckle as he stood and went into the house.
Standing at the kitchen door with his hands on each side of the door jamb Cole felt alone. Kelly’s energy was gone. He did miss her already. Seventeen days to go. Most of the work on the house was done. He would still need to line up a realtor. For the first time he felt a twinge of guilt. The thought was dismissed as foolish. What would he do with a house twenty-five hundred miles from home? It would fall into disrepair again. People need housing, a home; this place would make a fine home.
Yet he felt ungrateful. Silly as it seemed he’d grown fond of the house. He liked the little town and was getting used to the quiet of the nights in the country. He had an itch to write suddenly. The article Chuck talked about. “Life on the Farm” stuff. Maybe there was something to the Mother Earth News, “Back to the Land” philosophy. He went to the office he’d set up and dug around in the desk for paper.
Pen in hand at the kitchen table he started jotting down sketches of ideas, random thoughts, and reflections, really, about the city boy in the country. He found himself sounding more like Thoreau then, and less and less, the objective reporter he was trying to portray. Five sheets of rambling notes later he laid the pen on the table.
Cole stood and walked to the window. The silence of the house was more than he could bear. He needed to get out and get some fresh air. He grabbed his car keys from the counter, went to the living room and took a dozen notebooks from the shelf and was out the door. With no real destination he drove to the center of town. The sky was a deep azure blue and huge white clouds rolled overhead. Next to the courthouse the lawn was trimmed thick and dotted with picnic tables.
There was one parking spot left on the sunny side of the park. With notebooks in hand, Cole made his way to a grey wooden table half in the shade, the other in the bright sunlight. The glare off the table made it impossible to read so Cole slid to the shady side and started organizing the notebooks. A blue jay landed on the sunny end of the table and pecked at the scattered crumbs and paper of someone’s breakfast muffin. Cole traced the deep grooves where someone carved “CB loves LG”.
He glanced around the park and at the courthouse beyond. It probably hadn’t changed much since his grandfather’s time. As he opened the first notebook he had a strange sense of opening a window into the past. Cole smiled at the thought of time travel movies he’d seen, and entertained the fantasy of stepping back into 1920’s Orvin. The blue jay flapped its wings and took flight, bringing Cole back to the present. He opened the notebook on the top of the stack and flipped through several short entries. Then the words of one caught his eye.
Thanksgiving 1929
I have little to be thankful for this year. Mr. McMartin gave me a turkey and a pay envelope yesterday. Then wished me well saying, “We have not sold a car in nearly a mon
th. People are not spending money on anything it seems. At first we thought the stock market collapse would not affect anybody who didn’t own stock. We were so wrong.” So I’m out of a job.
Alma fixed a fine dinner. The girls made little pilgrims at school cut out of black and white paper. I am concerned with our welfare.
December 12
Mattie had the baby today. Things are so bad with Alma I made no pretense of hiding going to be with her. We have a beautiful little girl we named Lottie. Effie now has a little sister and I have another mouth to feed. Mattie has been taking in laundry up until the last three weeks. She has made more money than I have. She very sweetly offered to give me some. I refused.
I still can’t find work. Everybody is scared. Even the Davis’s are tightening their belt. I figured people still got to eat. But they say there are no orders and Thanksgiving was so bad they had birds go unshipped.
I know I promised Alma no more gambling but I think I need to break that promise. Mattie has saved up five dollars and said I should see what I can do. I will find a game tonight.
December 13
Twenty Five Dollars!! It was like pickin’ apples from a tree. I gave Mattie ten, Alma five and kept ten for my bankroll. I would have given Alma more but she would have got suspicious.
January 6, 1930
A new year and things show no signs of getting better. I passed the Pontiac dealership and it is closed up. I feel for McMartin and his family but I feel for the men who worked there more. I am thinking tonight of Carter Bascomb, his wife is sickly and old. What will an old fellow like him ever find to do again?
It has been a week since we buried Alma’s mother and she still is given to crying spells. I hated that old woman but I don’t wish anyone dead. The poor devil’s got a nasty playmate now.
I ran into Tom Wilkerson coming out of a game. They have made that son of a bitch a deputy sheriff. He tried throwing his weight around with me and some of the boys but we were having none of it. All the same, I did not like the way he looked at me. He is a cur and is apt to do real mischief with that badge.
Cole flipped past pages of entries that were just the day to day news of survival and the misery of the town. It seemed to Cole that George spun himself into a web that just seemed to get tighter as the days flew by. He was supporting five children and suffering the emotional roller coaster of rags to riches and back to rags in the course of a few card games. His relationship with Alma was very strange. She appeared in the notebooks as a wicked witch one week and a good mother and homemaker the next.
Mattie on the other hand, was a constant source of comfort and encouragement to George. Good times or bad, they communicated on a level of intimacy and trust that Cole envied. Cole’s greatest disappointment was that George never went into detail about the discussions of books that he so enjoyed with Mattie. They read Dickens and Jane Austen, and even Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. What did a poor uneducated girl like Mattie make of the idea of creating life? It was sad to read between the lines and feel the hurt and frustration of their inability to be together.
They built a family that anyone would be proud to have, yet were kept secret and apart from the people of the town. Many of the questions that burned in Cole’s mind went unanswered. Who did the people of the town think the tall beautiful dark skinned woman was? There must have been talk. Alma was too bitter to be quiet. Tom Wilkerson’s smart remark ended in a beating. Did everyone else just turn a blind eye to the “colored” mistress of one of the town’s “less admirable” citizens?
Little was mentioned of George’s children with Alma. He wrote of birthdays and ice cream sodas during flush times and tales of carving little toys for them when he went bust. Those things were more about him or Alma’s reactions, not about the children. Effie on the other hand was always a topic of great pride: her learning to walk, talk and detailed descriptions of her dimples and curly hair. George wrote of how Mattie made her clothes and how Effie cooed and watched over her little sister. In one passage he laid out in great detail Lottie’s difficulty in learning to walk and how he agonized over the prospect that she may be “lame”.
It is a sad fact but descriptions of Paula, Josie, and Connie were nowhere to be found.
Nineteen-thirty went by without many events of any great importance. The first intriguing entry came in June, “still no rain.” Cole paused and tried to recall the years of the Dust Bowl. He knew his father’s family left Oklahoma during that time. It would be soon. Opening the next notebook would bring him just that much closer to the event that led to his father’s birth. As he began to flip through the pages and scan the entries, the bitterness in George’s life became almost palpable.
March 3, 1931
For the first time in my life I will go to bed hungry. I lost my bankroll and have nowhere to get another. Mattie sent home a bag of vegetables from her garden and root cellar. Alma didn’t ask where they came from. She made a stew. To make sure nothing was wasted she didn’t peel anything she didn’t absolutely have to. The vegetables lasted the better part of the week but they are now gone. I did not eat yesterday or today so that there would be food for the children.
April 12, 1931
I took down the “for sale” sign in front of the house today. In three months not one person has asked about it. I went to the bank and talked to the manager there about a loan on the house. He said, “We no longer make loans.” I told him my father had been a bank manager. He then asked a strange question, “Have you paid this year’s taxes?” I said that I hadn’t and he said that he didn’t know of anyone who had. There was something fishy about the way he acted.
May 9, 1931
I walked downtown today. More than half the stores and businesses were boarded up. This old town is just about to dry up and blow away. If Mama and Papa could see it now they would surely weep. We survived the twister, and the Spanish Influenza, to have a stock market crash, and drought bring us to our knees.
I have heard recently of jobs out west. I think my car could easily make the trip, but for the life of me I can’t figure out where we would get the money to go. I talked with Mattie about going. She was angry that I would even consider leaving Alma and the girls behind. I have heard that in California they are more accepting of mixed marriages. I am willing, but I don’t know if I can change Mattie’s mind. Our girls could easily pass for white or maybe Mexican. It’s a dream but
The entry stopped there. Across the page was a blotch of ink. Three pages later the stain was pale enough for an entry.
May 11
Alma has been on fire for the past few days. Since she found she was pregnant again, she has been cleaning and straightening like there was no tomorrow. She found my notebooks where I hid them here in my writing room. She burned the manuscript for my book in the stove and tore pages out of my notebooks. When I came home there were pages all over the floor and the shirt box I used to store my manuscript was stomped flat.
It has been ten years since we married and I have never hated her more than today. The last thing I want is another child with her blood running through them. My father taught me to never strike a woman, but as God as my witness, I could beat that bitch to death with my bare hands.
Cole laid the notebook face down on the table. He ran his hands through his hair and blew out a deep sigh. Across the lawn a woman in her early twenties pushed a stroller onto the grass. Two small children ran in opposite circles around her laughing and giggling each time their circles intersected. Cole thought of his parents.
The image of his mother unloading groceries from the back of their old Vista Cruiser station wagon popped into his mind. A smile crossed his face as he remembered his father coming out of the house and taking the bags from his mother’s arms and giving her a kiss on the cheek. They loved each other. Little things that they thought only passed between them, his mother hugging his father from behind as he stood at the kitchen sink putting “elbow grease” into the cleaning of crusty pots and pans, or
his father giving her a gentle pat on the behind as she passed his recliner where he read the paper.
It was the gentle way they grew old together and died within months of each other that lasted in Cole’s memory. To think of his grandparent’s smoldering hatred of each other caused Cole to nearly shudder. Once again he was overcome by his guilt at reading his grandfather’s journals. But surely, he kept them for such a time. The years of lugging them around in a trunk, storing them, protecting them and in the end shipping them to an old farmhouse in Orvin spoke volumes about the man and the importance of these old notebooks.
A warm breeze blew across the courthouse lawn and Cole sat motionless at the picnic table watching the birds peck at the tabletop not three feet away. The young mother sat leaning back on her elbows as the two small children ran and did summersaults on the grass. Few cars passed on the street. Occasionally a man in a dark suit would come up the walk and enter the courthouse. Lawyers, all looking alike, all making a living feeding on other people’s problems, all scurrying about with their briefcases in hand.
The read and the unread, the stacks of notebooks were now pretty much even. The years went by with the turn of a page and the life of George Sage poured out in tedium mixed with torment. Cole ran his finger across the top of the stack of unread notebooks.
“Mind if I share your table?” Cole snapped around, startled at the voice behind him.”
“Not at all,” he replied.
A nondescript man of indeterminate age came around the table and sat across from Cole. He wore the same dark suit and white tie that marked the men Cole took for lawyers entering the courthouse.
“Squealing kids have never been an aid to digestion in my case,” the man said, nodding toward the young mother and her kids who played near the other picnic table.
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