by S. Rose
The change that came over him wasn’t confined to me alone. My father’s rough edges seemed to soften a bit, and he became more thoughtful and considerate of others in general. He surprised Mom and me one morning at breakfast by owning Timmy Schimschack as his blood relation, his cousin Lester’s kid—his dead mother’s brother Lyle’s nephew.
“What does that make us, Dad? Are you his uncle, or second cousin, or what?”
“Makes us stuck with ’im, that’s what.”
“Ha.” I laughed at his joke. “But seriously, Dad . . . how come you never liked the Schimschacks?” I ventured cautiously. We’d been holding actual conversations lately, and I was testing the boundaries of his confidence.
“Gosh, I don’ know . . . what’s not to like?” he said expansively, spreading his hands wide. “Our family’s got a little of everything. We’ve got drunks, abandonment, crime, chronic unemployment, and dire poverty . . . a half-wit boy and a half-Indian love child . . .”
“George, be careful; think about what you’re saying,” my mother cautioned.
“I am thinking, Tina,” he informed her. “Don’t forget that this little Indian here,” he gave my long braid a gentle tug, “will be starting school next week.” He looked at my mother knowingly.
“I see what you mean,” she said.
“What do you see?” I interjected. “Won’t somebody tell me?”
“That’s my point exactly,” Dad answered me while looking at my mother.
“Your father means that this is a very small town. Everybody knows everybody else’s business and gossip is . . . uh . . .”
“A competitive sport,” Dad offered with a laugh. “It’s right up there with fishing for walleye,” he added. I noticed that the relaxed smile on his face made him look much younger, as if he’d peeled back a few years of worry and wear.
“Well, there’s not much to do over the long winters. People sit and gab, way too much, if you ask me,” Mom elaborated. “Anyway, you’re bound to hear stories when you get to school. The other girls will give you an earful, you betcha. You might as well hear the truth from us. On second thought, why don’t you do the honors, dear,” she suggested to Dad.
“Gee, thanks,” he said. I looked from one to the other.
“Your father is going to tell you all about his family,” she explained with a wry smile. “Why don’t you two take a drive out to Lake Gibwa . . . Gibawannabe . . .?”
“Lake Gibwanaabaawe,” Dad helped her out.
“Ya, that one. It’s real pretty and quiet, and the weather won’t stay this nice for long. Besides, I’ve got work to do.”
“Coward,” Dad retorted sarcastically, but he got up and fished his car keys out of his pocket. “Com’ on, Puddin’ Pie. Let’s go skip stones on the lake.”
I noticed right off that the Ford station wagon was clean. After the gravel drive went in, my father had thoroughly washed the car and even polished it up. “The car looks nice, Dad,” I said, as I got in.
“Yeah.” He climbed in and the door shut with a creak and a rusty groan. “I’m going to trade it in . . . don’t expect to get much, but the least I could do is clean ’er up a bit so we don’t disgrace ourselves entirely at the dealership.”
“We’re getting rid of the Woody? We’re getting a new car?” I exclaimed, with decidedly mixed feelings.
“We sure are, hon, a brand-shiny-spankin’ new truck, and not a Ford, neither. I’ve been looking at an Apache pickup.” He bubbled with the joy of child talking about what he might get for Christmas.
“Wow!” I wondered how we could afford it, but was afraid to sound impertinent; I had a good thing going with Dad, and I tread cautiously.
“The cab will be plenty big enough for you and me and Mom to go on Northwoods adventures. We can’t drive this old rattletrap . . . we’ll get stuck in the snow all the time. You need a good truck out here in these parts.”
We arrived at One Drowns Lake. I stood at the edge and looked across the shimmering water that reflected the surrounding trees and white puffy clouds like a black glass mirror. This was where Grandma Parsons went down with the fish . . . I was in the middle of thinking . . . “Jeez,” I yelled and jumped, startled by a large flat stone that flew right past my head and bounced off the surface three times before it sank. “Yikes, Dad, you just missed me.”
“Naw . . . missed ya by about a mile. Don’t move.” He skipped another stone two feet to my right.
“You’ve sure got a good aim,” I said, walking toward him to be out of range.
“Here, lemme show ya how it’s done.”
“Oh, I don’t think I can do that,” I said.
“Sure ya can!”
For the next twenty minutes that seemed like much longer, my father tried unsuccessfully to teach me to skip a stone. All I could do was plunk them into the lake. I loved the attention, but I was bored to death and anxious to start talking. (How many men have struggled in futility to get their daughters to pitch a baseball or skip a stone? I know there’re exceptions—I can’t speak for all members of my sex, but most of us could care less about throwing things, even if we did have the arm for it, which we usually don’t.)
“I’m sorry, Dad.” I rubbed my sore arm. “I’m just no good at it. Maybe you can come out here with Timmy sometime and teach him to skip stones. I bet he’d like that,” I ventured, delicately trying to tell him that I wasn’t exactly enjoying myself. My secondary motivation was to bring the topic of the Schimschacks out into the open. Apparently, it worked.
“Not a chance,” he scoffed. “That poor, tubby little bas . . . shh . . . uh . . . boycan’t throw stones or play at much of anything else without risking a bleed.”
“Huh?”
“He’s got a disease . . . it’s called hemophilia. It means that his blood won’t clot properly.” Dad shot a stone across the lake. “Like if he gets a cut or falls down . . . he don’t even have to get cut. Hemophiliacs can bleed on the inside and that can be even worse. Timmy’s got it real bad, so he always had to be careful. He can’t play—can’t run or kick a ball because he might make his foot bleed. If he tried to whip a stone out over the lake, he’d likely get a joint bleed, maybe two, in his elbow and in his wrist. It’s a damned shame, but there ain’t much they can do about it . . . ’cept keep him safe . . . from all the things a boy normally does.”
“I wonder why Sparrow never mentioned it to me?”
“Can’t say for sure, but folks around here tend to be pretty closemouthed about their own . . . uh . . . delicate family matters. ’Cept when they rabbit on about other people’s business,” he added sarcastically.
“Rabbit what?”
“Gossip.”
“Oh . . . I thought you meant something about Timmy’s rabbits. He talks to ’em. Thinks they talk back, too.” I rolled my eyes for emphasis.
“I’m not a bit surprised,” he said.
“Hmm . . . if Timmy can’t run and play, that explains why he’s so . . . so . . .” I searched for a polite way to put it.
“Fat and flabby?” Dad supplied. “Yeah; he just shuffles around slowly, trying not to get hurt . . . trying to stay out of the hospital. He’s been in and out for blood transfusions. It’s a wonder he even lived this long. They think he had some blood on his brain once, but they’re not sure. Timmy’s always been kind of slow . . . an odd duck, really. But I suppose you would be, stuck at home with your mother and sister, never getting to play with other boys . . . always scared you might fall down or get hit with a ball and bleed to death.”
“How did he get the hemophilia?” I asked.
“It’s hereditary; if you inherit something, it means that you don’t catch it, you’re born with it,” he explained. “It turned out that Anna Gorski was a carrier, but she didn’t know it. Timmy had to inherit it from his mother, because somehow a man can’t pass the disease to his sons. When they found out Timmy was a hemophiliac, Lester took it bad. He was resentful, acted like Anna was somehow responsible for givin
g him a defective son, like she ought to have known she carried the disease. Lowdown skunk left her flat with a sick kid. He felt justified too . . . went around saying he never would’ve married her if he’d known she had that. Ha! Like he was some kinda prize.”
“Whada ya mean, Dad?”
“Maybe Lester didn’t have hemophilia, but he inherited the usual Schimschack defects.” He spoke with bitterness and searched the ground for a suitable rock to hurl at fate. The muscles in his jaw began to twitch. I was wondering what Schimschack defects he was hoping to kill off with stones when another thought took precedence.
“What about Sparrow?” I worried. “Could she come down with hemophilia too?”
“No, girls can only carry the disease—women can pass it on to their sons, but they don’t get sick.”
“That’s a relief, but it’s too bad about poor Timmy.” Then my thoughts circled back to the earlier question. “Dad, what kind of defects do Schimschacks inherit? What happened with Lester and Uncle Lyle?”
“The Schimschacks were all drunks, every last one of ’em . . . and the men were dumb as mud. None of ’em amounted to a hill ’o beans. Lester was a drunk, just like his father . . . ’cept Lyle was worse. Lester was bad enough; he used to go on sprees and disappear for days, even weeks at a time. Once, he was gone for a month. When Timmy was about two years old, Lester left and just never came back. There was a rumor he ran off to Canada with an Indian woman. Who knows?”
“What happened to Uncle Lyle?” I asked in morbid fascination.
“He finally drank himself to death—died one night when he was staggering home drunk in the middle of winter and passed out in the woods. It was forty below and this far north, the snow piles higher than your head. When Lester found old Lyle, he was sittin’ in the deep snow with his back up against a tree, like he was just having himself a nap . . . ’cept he was stiff as a block of ice. Lester always claimed that the shock of finding his daddy frozen like a human Popsicle drove him to drink.”
“What drove Lyle to drink?”
“A weak character. All the Schimschack men had weak characters. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a few drinks. A man has got to have some self-control, is all.”
“What happened to the rest of the family?”
“They were troubled people. I don’t know much about the old Kraut who came over from Germany, but he did something real bad . . .”
“What did he do?”
“Oh, I don’t know exactly what, but it was bad enough to land him in jail for a long time.”
The look on my father’s face along with the tone of his voice told me he wasn’t entirely forthcoming on this point, but I didn’t let on.
“He left a passel of kids destitute,” Dad continued. “They lost the family farm, and the mother had no way to feed her children . . . there was no welfare back then. She had to turn them over to the state. Yup; my mother was raised in an orphanage during the depression. I don’t know much about it, but it must’ve been pretty bad,” he was quick to add. “Back when I was a kid, if I asked about her childhood, Ma would kinda groan and shake her head, as if trying to wake up from a nightmare. Guess that’s why she started drinking shortly after she married Dad. He had no idea that she’d develop a weakness for drink—she was only eighteen. I remember my mother would be fine for a while, maybe all year, but then she’d go on a bender and drink nonstop for a week at a time. As she got older, her binges got closer and closer together until she was hardly sober at all. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead; she was my mother, and she was a good woman when she wasn’t drinking. Somehow, it affected her in a peculiar way. I don’t know about the rest of the Schimschacks, but I think my ma’s drinking was a kind of sickness. She just wasn’t herself when she drank.”
My father stopped skipping stones. His shoulders went slack, and he seemed to shrink two inches. Then he took a deep breath and said, “There’s something else, and I might as well say it. My mother was the youngest of four girls. Her sisters were much older; Ma was born years after the last boy, almost as if she were an afterthought. The older Schimschack sisters were all touchy people, tended to keep to themselves.” He spoke in a lowered voice, even though no one was visible for miles around. “My daddy always said it was because they had such a hard life with Old Man Schimschack. Anyway, I have an Aunt Greta still living . . . she must be close to ninety years old. There were nine siblings in all, and she’s the last of that generation of Schimschacks.”
Dad had gradually, almost imperceptibly slowed his speech until he seemed to run out of words like a car out of gas. I waited in respectful silence. “Well,” he continued, “she’s in an asylum for the insane. That’s the proper way to put it, though you’ll probably hear other things, like loony bin . . . nuthouse . . . funny farm; she’s been there for well-nigh thirty years,” he finished softly. “Christ,” he suddenly exploded. “People can be so cruel, Cassandra, especially children . . . so goddamned cruel.” He had been looking out over the water, but now turned to look me full in the face.
“I . . . I don’t say mean things like that, Dad,” I whispered, a bit frightened at his raw emotion.
“No, I didn’t mean you, honey. I know you’re a good girl. You’re a lucky girl—you have a wonderful mother, and she’s done a great job, brought you up right. Your Aunt Gudrun, too,” he added suddenly. “She’s a fine lady . . . always set a good example.”
At the mention of Tante, I was flooded with emotion that I’d kept at bay since early July. I’m not sure whether they were tears of sorrow at missing her or tears of joy because my father finally acknowledged Tante Gudy’s importance in my life, but they flowed like rain.
Dad dropped down on one knee in front of me and held forth his open arms. I yielded without hesitation and sobbed with abandon on his shoulder. “Oh, oh, Puddin’ . . . I’m so sorry . . . I’m so . . . I’m such a sorry bastard. I don’t deserve you . . . I never deserved you.”
“Don’t say that, Daddy. And I’m sorry about what I said on the drive up. I didn’t really hope your arm would get torn off by a bear.”
“Huh? Oh, I’d forgotten all about that.” He chuckled a bit. “It’s kind of funny, now that I think of it. But what happened later wasn’t funny. And I promise to do better.” He put one hand on either side my face and looked into my eyes. “Say, how would you like to take a trip on a big Greyhound bus, go down to Racine and spend Thanksgiving break with your aunt?”
“Really? I’d love to. But can’t we all go?”
“No, we can’t . . . your mom and I have too much to do. If things go as planned, we’ll be ready for guests soon. We’ll be staying up here straight through the holidays this year.”
“Oh . . . but I thought we were all going to visit Tante for Christmas.”
“That was the plan. I’m sorry to have to disappoint you, but the plan has changed. We just can’t afford to take the time. Besides, this will give you a chance to catch up with your aunt . . . just the two of you.”
“Okay, Dad,” I said hurriedly, wanting to be agreeable.
On the drive home, my father continued to regale me with the lighter side of the Schimschack chronicles.
“Yeah, these woods are full of Schimschacks. They disappear, but sometimes they turn up again when you least expect it . . . just when you hoped you were finally rid of ’em—ha. Take my Cousin Frank—please.” I laughed along with the old joke. “He left his wife too, don’t recall her name . . . at least they didn’t have kids. Wait—her name was Betty, and he didn’t leave her, she threw him out. He probably deserved it. They had this little shack in the pines, just like all the rest of ’em, and one day about three years after he’d gone, Frank shows up with a buzz saw and a gas-powered generator!”
“Oh-oh!” I said, getting scared.
“No, he didn’t use it on Betty; he used it on the house. Frank declared that it was shared marital property, and he was there to take his half. So without further ado, he whips out his saw and
begins to slice up one wall. Betty started hollering at him to stop, told him he was crazy. I’d agree with that. Anyway, they had no phone so she couldn’t call the police, and she didn’t have transportation ’cause Frank had taken the truck. All she could do was run, run down the road to the nearest neighbor with a phone, in the middle of winter, too.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I’m about to show you what happened. It was one of the most talked about events around; people still recall it to this day and drive out to the place to take a gander and snap pictures. It’s kind of like a local historical site.”
We turned down a dirt road, wound around some and came upon the strangest shack I’d ever seen. At first I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at; then it hit me. “Oh my God,” I whispered. Mother would not have approved of my taking the Lord’s name in vain, but I felt the occasion warranted it. “Is that . . .?”
“Yup. It’s half a house. Cousin Frank sawed it up one side, across the roof, down the other side, and across the floorboards. Nobody knows quite how he got it on his truck, but he hauled it off and reassembled it about ten miles that way.” Dad pointed down the road. “You can’t tell what happened from looking at his half. He used the pieces and fashioned a regular place, but poor Betty couldn’t afford to build hers up again. Some of the neighbors got together and boarded up that whole side so she wouldn’t freeze to death. And that’s the reason why there’s one blind wall running long-ways from the ground to the roofline, nothing but sheets of plywood tacked over with tarpaper.”
18
MY FATHER DID not purchase the Apache pickup truck. Over my mother’s fiercely whispered protestations, he asked to try out the new model Chevy Bel Air. Dad came back from the test drive with stars in his eyes, and I just knew we’d be driving home in that red-and-white four-door sedan with a hood as long as the bow of a yacht. He was puffed up with excitement, like a schooner at full mast; I’d seen it before, and once the wind was in his sails, there was nothing much to do but go along for the ride.
