by Laura Newman
It was the early 1930s and I was a young boy in Iowa. I loved the first snow, the promise of ice skates and mittens, warm milk. I would run outside and stomp through the drifts and pull the frozen air into my lungs. I would go to Jerry’s house and his ma would give us that milk and maybe a cookie. I never asked. I never knocked on their door. I knew if I hung out on the street, if I just watched the leaves fall from the trees like pieces of silver, if I just watched the black cat pad across the ice, her paws doing the quickstep, I knew Jerry would show up. And all the quiet would shatter.
Here he comes now, red scarf, red hair, corduroys and rubber boots, a whirlwind of a friend. He made all my noise for me. “Louie, Louie, Louie, it snowed!” he would shout, like I didn’t know it snowed until he told me. The cat ran away. Jerry knocked into a tree and snow sparkled on his head and he laughed and grabbed my arm. We ran down the streets in the still morning, lace curtains drawn over ice-etched windows, milk out on the steps. We ran into the fields and beyond to the border forest, where we were alone and the only one who came before us on this cold day was the silver fox I saw loping ahead in the distance.
For Jerry it wouldn’t do that the fox made the only mark in the snow. The fact that the fox prints were pure and made a kind of fretwork pattern didn’t matter to him. Jerry peed in big loop-de-loops branding the snow. So I did it too, not because I wanted to, but because I did what Jerry did. We frittered the morning away, scattering birds, rousing the wind, breaking the fragile ice on the edges of the stream and sucking the pieces like cold candy. Then we went to Jerry’s house and sat by the fire and dripped dry reading comic books and smelling our own smelly socks.
It seemed a good start to a winter. My brothers and sister are older than I am—Frank and Ernest, names to live up to, and Rose, a flower name. We are a team. We keep everyone but family away from our house. We keep an eye out. If Rose sees Jerry coming up the street, she sends me out before he reaches the door. It never strikes him as odd that I anticipate his knock and the door is open, my arms climbing into my coat, shutting the door behind me, before his fist meets the green paint. He’s oblivious. I think he’s oblivious.
It isn’t as if the town doesn’t know about us. Everybody knows that Pa left us and remarried and has a second family in Des Moines and even has a new son, also named Ernest. People talk. I worry about the day Ernest meets Ernest. Will it be civil or fisticuffs? I worry that Pa will have another son and name him Louis and then I will become a ghost son. I never have the nerve to ask Ernest how he feels, but without talking about it we all take to calling him Ed and he never goes back.
I know because I hear the Aunties talk that Ma used to be a little girl with braids and ribbons in her hair and skin like summer milk in a pail. I know she worked for Quaker Oats. In Iowa, we consider the image on the Quaker Oats container a kind of Uncle Sam. I know that the doctor had to cut me out of Ma’s stomach and I don’t know what that means, except it makes me feel guilty.
Ma is straight of back and wears her braids pinned up crisscross. But she whispers to herself all day and forgets the chores and Rose does the Ma work and Frank and Ed take care of the Pa things. I’m still considered the baby so I get easy stuff like carrying the wood in and the ashes out.
When I came home that first winter afternoon from Jerry’s house the light of the day was already on the wane. If there was a look in Ma’s eye that afternoon, some shadow of what was in her mind, I missed it. I can catch the disappearing fox on the horizon, I can see the draft of the bird’s wing, but I can’t for one instant catch the movement of my own life. Had I known, I would have had an asthma attack for sure.
In the morning, Rose, Frank, and Ed go to work. Ed has a light step because he is getting ready to take a wife named Agnes. Agnes is a corn-fed Iowa beauty sure to go to fat, but not yet. Right now she looks a perfect pudding. We like her and the noise she brings inside our house. The tick-tock of the clock diminishes when she is in the room. Frank plans to have a corn farm and I plan to eat his corn straight off the stalk, just pull back the husk. Rose wants to go to California, see the ocean and feel the sun on her shoulders even in winter, and eat an orange that does not come once a year in a Christmas stocking. These are the things I know about my family.
I wake up and expect to get ready for school but Ma is standing in my doorway with her faded red suitcase and a smaller valise which she hands to me and tells me to fill with a pair of jeans and a shirt. I do it and put in my favorite little blanket too; Rose calls it my baby blanket, but I don’t. I assume we are going to see the Aunties. We go outside and the cold slams us back, but Ma steels her spine, takes my hand, we start walking. The Aunties live the other way.
I’ve never been to the train station before. It’s sooty and all the snow is melted into gray slush and the sun has come out and turned the rails to mercury. A train goes by in a hiss of steam and the rails glitter like mercury. I stare after the train until it disappears. There’s a lot of noise and rush rush rush. Ma buys the tickets and it’s “All Aboard” for Chicago. I have no memory of the trip except I drank a grape soda. What a color to drink!
Chicago. I can’t tell you what happened to Ma. I can’t tell you how our hands became separated in the crowd, waiting for the light to change, walking through the valley of the buildings where there is but a slice of sky at the top and the doors open in circles that run round and round like a carnival ride. I can’t say how I lost her. How did she lose hold of my hand? Did she just lose her grip on my woolly mitten, did the crowd shift as a herd against her, did a bad man jerk at her red suitcase and upset her balance?
When Ma’s papa died the Aunties said Ma dried up like a tobacco leaf and they didn’t understand it. They would say, “Remember how pretty Emily was?” And then the next part was said in the lowest whispers, but I had really good ears before the war. The Aunties said that Ma was the pretty one, white like paper-whites. All the sisters slept in the same room so they heard when their papa came into the room sometimes at night when the owls were out, climbed in bed with Emily and he made sounds like the night owls and Emily made no sounds at all. At first the sisters were jealous because they loved their papa, loved to climb in his lap to listen to the radio and he would stroke their arms softly. It made them hate Emily a little bit. I did not understand this but I understood that now the Aunties hated their papa, a man I never did know outside of photographs.
I crossed the street with the crowd because it pushed me forward. I yelled for Ma but the streetcars, the horses, the automobiles, the horns of the automobiles, the paper boys, the very click of a thousand heels on cobblestones, the sounds bounced off all the silvered doors and windows and all of it jumbled together and no one even heard my voice. Not even me.
The Aunties thought Ma would be glad when her papa died, but she mourned something too hard. Like she had lost a husband, the Aunties whispered. So Ma’s husband left too. I heard these coffee-cup stories told on visiting afternoons while I was too young to be taken into account. I knew Ma set up her own bedroom with a lock on the door after I was cut out of her stomach, then her papa died, and then Pa left us. I was pretty sure it was my fault. So now it must be my fault that I was in Chicago and I don’t even know what Chicago is.
Except cold. I know Chicago is cold. There was a man selling chestnuts like in the Christmas song, steam and a harvest smell coming from his stall. He gave me a wrapper of nuts, I held them to pull all the heat into my hands and then I ate them, but really chestnuts taste like mush. I don’t know why people like them, but the song is nice. Rose wants to eat oranges fresh from a California grove. Well, I don’t care if I ever eat an orange again because the rinds I pulled from the garbage bin were bitter and curling up and I can’t eat an orange but I’ll always think of those moldy bits. I slept three nights in the corners of buildings and watched the moon glint off the million windows. It was never really dark, and I pulled garbage around me, hid beneath it, pulled into a
corner like a windswept pile of rubbish. In the days I walked just to bring on a warmth from the friction. Mostly I was invisible, but some people noticed me, handed me small things to eat. I wasn’t the only urchin. Finally, a policeman found me and the Aunties picked me up. I left my baby blanket in the street.
At school Bob, who was a stupid bully, made fun of me, called my ma crazy. The teacher told him to hush and gave me a look of such sympathy it hurt even worse because it verified Bob’s claim. She sent me out of the room to get some wood for the stove. Even I knew she was giving me a chance to regain my composure and cool my skin in the brittle air. But Jerry was having none of that. At lunch he found Bob out at the empty tetherball pole and Jerry’s eyes were bulging with rage and somehow he pulled off looking like he meant business the way only a redhead kid can do. He made Bob lick the pole. Then we ran away because Jerry wasn’t that big and as soon as his eyes went back to normal Bob would lose his fear and beat us both up. So we ran fast and hard and giggling. Besides, half the time we were friends with Bob.
Ma came home about six months later. They had her in a Home, the meaning of which was not made clear to me. What was wrong with our home? I was happy to see her, but she was quiet and the Aunties and Rose took over more than ever. Rose took to sighing and I think she was sighing for the receding beaches of California. But she did make it there. After the war she lived there for the rest of her life.
Winter jumped the equator and I forgot about Chicago like a silvery flight of a dream. No one ever asked me about it and it became a memory of clamoring noise and hunger. Sometimes I really would dream of it, or more honestly admit that I remembered. I would see Ma holding my hand, I would see the light change from red to green. I am moving forward, and I would clearly see her. Just letting go.
Then came the summer of the lightning bugs. They made each long evening aglitter, and if there was a dust bowl down in Kansas, a stock market in New York that opened high windows, and an exodus of immigrants destined to starve in the very cornucopia of California, well, Iowa was having none of that. The corn was growing, the fireflies haloed the inky sky. They tangled in Maureen’s hair; she was the field faery and I fell in love with her simply because she tucked silver-gold bugs behind her ears. We played kickball in the streets, hide and seek, king of the hill, anything that let us run. All of us, Jerry, Bob, Maureen, Sally, Joe. The lightning bugs blinked on and off and buzzed like neon, which wasn’t even invented yet, all summer long.
One morning before the heat set in Rose saw Maureen coming up the street commanding a Radio Flyer. She had Jerry and Bob in tow. She looked on a mission. Rose sent me out quick, I pulled up my socks and we headed down to the stream by the railway tracks to have a Morning Tea. Maureen came up with this thing and the only reason I could think she got Jerry and Bob to come along was because of the still-warm oatmeal cookies we could smell coming out of the cloth-covered basket set in the wagon. I went along for her green eyes.
She laid out the square of blue-check cloth, filled chipped china with Kool-Aid, and gave us the cookies. We played along, thanked her cordially, and ate with formal bites, even Bob. But then we had to impress her, reclaim our physical selves, so we took to racing on the rails to see who could balance the longest, run the fastest on the slender reflective steel. It was a hard thing to balance and run at the same time. Maureen laughed at us and we all stopped when the 9:15 came through loud as a lion and smelly too. I thought about the hobo life, I thought about Chicago. Maureen joined in the steel race and darn if she wasn’t the best of us. I couldn’t stand that so I ran all the faster and then we were parallel and the steel rails below me shone back my red socks. I slipped clean off the rail and smashed my head, and the only color I saw was silver. I buzzed like the lightning bugs. Then I wasn’t anymore anything.
This part I know from later. I broke open my head and Jerry picked up my unconscious body and put me in the Radio Flyer. Jerry ran me back home and says, he swears it, that there were two inches of blood in the wagon bed and he could see my brains. Well, it was the Depression. Ma took me in and shooed the kids away, stitched me up with the same kitchen needle she used on the Thanksgiving turkey, but she did use her best white thread. I lay in bed unconscious for six days and Rose read the Bible over me and dripped water into my mouth. I was expected to die. I do believe I dreamed of God and he had a halo of fireflies. There was the smell of grass and blood, his eyes on fire. He told me to pull up my red socks and get on with it.
I spent the rest of the summer in bed. No visitors allowed. Mostly I listened to music on the radio but sometimes just before the sun was completely gone and all the kids called home, Jerry would knock at my window and we would talk in the almost-dark. He would tell me what’s new, and once he gave me a piece of Black Jack. He told me Maureen’s ma washed my blood out of the wagon but Maureen was done with that wagon. He told me he kept a little piece of my brains so if I needed them back when school started I could have them back. You know how redheaded kids kid, yet the idea of it stuck with me. He brought me some fireflies in a Mason jar. Ma took that jar away, washed it out, and added it to the cupboard. But that didn’t matter because all I had to do was open the window at night—in came the lights, like lanterns swinging on a pirate ship sailing a choppy sea.
Some years went by and my brains didn’t fall out. Ed married Agnes and here came three little kids plop plop plop and a whole lot of diapers. Agnes refined the art of cooking goose-grease dumplings and greens and those little kids looked like dumplings themselves, all fat and white. Agnes took to wearing housedresses and aprons and Ed took to suspenders. Their life seemed on a fine tangent. Frank got his little piece of farm and planted his corn, but I came not to eat it because he ended up raising feed corn, as there’s a market for that. Rose stayed home with Ma and me, and there came to be a little crease between her eyes. I knew she was just waiting for me to grow up a little bit more and she would go. I think I knew even then that they were all going to leave Ma to me.
The Aunties were as yappy as ever talking about the I-talians taking over parts of town and then those Jewish families over on Seventh. Jerry’s pa died, run over by a car with a woman driver, which started up the debate again that women shouldn’t be allowed to drive. Jerry cried so hard at the funeral he got the hiccups so I just joined right in the crying with him so he wouldn’t feel so alone about it. I knew Jerry’s ma was worried about keeping their house, but as it turned out, Jerry’s pa actually had a life insurance policy so his ma was okay. She took to playing Bingo at the Parlor instead of the church basement. In the summer she drank iced coffee down at the Good Morning Café. I do believe the Metropolitan Life salesman had a run on new policies that year; even the Aunties had a glossy brochure.
Bob dropped out of school after eighth grade, but many kids did. Time to go to work or learn their pa’s trade. It was common. Bob would be a butcher because a lot of slaughtering gets done in Iowa and you don’t need a Shakespeare sonnet to slice the gullet of a sow. I will tell you Bob eventually turned out some of the best sausage you ever tasted and his kids still use the recipe and sell Robert’s Famous Sausage nationwide on the Internet. Maureen, well her eyes just turned all the more green, and I read up on all the sonnets just in hopes I could use those great words to win the damsel fair.
And so we slid quietly toward The Day That Will Live in Infamy.
What is Hawaii to an Iowa boy? To think of one day going to California, to think of going to New York City—those were possibilities. But Hawaii was unthinkable. Hawaii was the place where raindrops touch ground and burst open in a splash of sunshine. Where women tuck Plumeria behind their ears instead of bugs. Where they eat poi and pineapple and pretty soon, SPAM. Apple pie and baseball are not a part of Hawaii, and the men there get tattoos of hula girls instead of MOM bannered through a heart. But everything changed with the attack on Pearl Harbor. In that moment, listening to the President of the United States on the radio, I was n
o longer an Iowan. I was an American.
Ma was silent as she clicked off the radio. I was perceptive enough to see the stories that Uncle Joe had told of the trenches flash in her stance, in the slight crumple of knee. I knew those stories too; I went with her to put tiger lilies on his grave each June. His mustard lungs did him in early. I could see her looking at me, courting the grave. She started to speak, I think she wanted to. But there was a knock on the door, insistent, and Rose was opening the door and there was Jerry, all red and blustery, actually in our house. He said, “Come on, come on, we’re going to Florsheim’s to make sure we ain’t got flat feet!”
Everything changed, the war changed everything. The posters went up, Uncle Sam Wants You, and on graduation day he would have us. Without any formal announcement we seniors started staying after school for weight training. We jumped rope until exhaustion felled us, and then we started on the sit-ups since we were already down. We were smack full of bravado.
If Ma was mentally ironing her best black dress, she held her counsel. At Sunday dinners Agnes was teasing, telling me we were acting like schoolgirls showing off our going-steady pins. The comparison was emasculating, but she was right. We were thinking about how good our new muscles were going to look in uniform and not beyond. Rose, who had been planning her escape, was thwarted by the war—if I left she couldn’t. She boiled so hot she could wash dishes with her bare hands.
If I could have listened to Rose, to Agnes, heard even in Ma’s silence the plea they would not fully voice, perhaps I could have stayed in Iowa. Perhaps I should have realized how momentous were the sound of summer crickets and the smell of grain in the silo, the sky bleached with heat, the sound of ice skates on the wintered pond. The silver fox running over the hill. I should have realized that a life need hold no more than that. A wife, a child, I could need no more. But I was having none of that.
