by Karen Wolff
She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Do you trust him, Harry?”
“I do, Gram. He’s a good worker.”
She nodded. It looked like I’d be going back to school. Now I had to see about my girlfriend. I decided to wait for her to come home from church that evening.
I’d wrestled all day with the words I’d say to her, searching for the best way to let her know how sorry I was. I huddled in the dark and cold at the Bellwood’s front gate waiting for their car to arrive home, waiting to talk to her.
Mr. Bellwood jumped out of the car first. He spoke first. “Hello, Harry. I didn’t expect to see you here.” He came over and extended his hand. “I wanted to say…I hope you know…about what happened Friday night. Well, what I mean…what I wanted to say…we’re so sorry. We didn’t do it, Harry.” He finally got it out, a sick, sad look on his face.
I just nodded and said, “I believe you, Mr. Bellwood. Thanks.”
The family got out. Carol Ann, a scarf knotted around her head against cold weather, wasn’t so friendly. “What are you doing here?” she asked, her eyes cold and hard looking.
“I…I want to talk to you.”
Mr. Bellwood gave us a puzzled look but shrugged his shoulders and went inside with his wife and Jerry.
“I don’t want to talk to you, Harry Spencer,” she said her voice cross. She turned to walk up the path to the front porch. “Anyway, it’s too cold out here.”
“Carol Ann. Don’t go in. Please don’t go in.” I sounded like a sick calf. She turned back to me. “Did you tell your dad what I said about him?” This wasn’t the way I planned to start the conversation, but the words just came out. “I didn’t mean it. It was an awful thing for me to say. I was so upset.”
“I didn’t tell him, Harry.” Her voice was almost a whisper compared to my noise.
“Oh, please Carol Ann. I’m so sorry about all that.”
“Yes, I suppose you are.” She tossed her head, her manner still icy. She must have hated me.
“I was so shocked to hear about my own father, to think he might have done something so dreadful. I lost control of myself. I deserved what you did to me. I’m glad you did it. It brought me to my senses.”
“Well, that’s something, I guess,” she said. “I was horrified you would behave that way. I couldn’t stand to hear what you said. It hurt me.”
I moved up the path to be closer to her. I longed to touch her. “Oh, please forgive me. Please Carol Ann,” I begged. “I love you so.”
She looked at me with a sad expression. “I thought that I loved you too, Harry. But now I wonder. I couldn’t believe you would say those things.”
“It was awful of me. I’ll never do anything like that again, I promise. Please, can we go back to the way we were? I’d give anything.”
“I don’t know, Harry.”
I reached out for her hand, and she let me take it. Our fingers were freezing, but my body tingled at the touch of her. I brought her closer and put my arms around her. She rested her head on my shoulder, and I could have held her there forever.
“Let me try to make it up, Carol Ann. Please let me try.”
“I can’t stay mad at you,” she murmured into my collar.
She turned her face to mine, and I kissed her lips and her cold face over and over. Then she ran up the steps. At the last second she said, “Will I see you in the morning for school?”
“You bet,” I said. She went inside, and I stood a moment holding on to the warmth I felt spreading through me. She was my girl again.
NOW THERE WAS just my father to face. I offered to pick up his washing early on Monday morning. Sally welcomed me into her warm kitchen. The breakfast things were cleared away, and Dad sat at the table with a school tablet and a pencil in his left hand. He frowned.
“We heard about what happened, Harry,” Sally said. “Are you all right?” Concern showed on her face.
“We’re okay,” I said, watching my father. He shoved away the tablet and pencil like he was embarrassed to be caught with it. Finally he said, “Granddad doing all right?”
“As well as can be expected, I guess.” Was he just saying that to cover himself? I couldn’t tell.
He looked away.
Sally squeezed my arm. “I’m so terribly sorry. I just don’t understand what makes people do the things they do,” she said.
“I appreciate that, Sally.” I waited for Dad to say something else, but he didn’t offer anything. It was an awkward moment.
Sally jumped in. “Look at what your father’s doing, Harry.” She held up the tablet where he had written his name about ten times in letters that looked like a little kid’s. “He’s teaching himself to write with his left hand.”
I said, “That’s good, Dad. Good job.” But my heart wasn’t in it. I headed for the door. Dad got up and walked out to the porch with me.
When the door closed behind us, he said, “I’m real sorry about what happened, Harry. Granddad and Buster and all.”
I was so relieved to hear him say that. Surely Dad couldn’t have been involved in this hideous thing. In that moment of torment, I wanted to hug him, to believe in him, to let my suspicions fall away, but something held me back. I grabbed the laundry bag and took off afraid I would break down if I stayed.
I HURRIED TO Carol Ann’s house eager to get to school, to see my friends, and to leave the troubles at home.
“Harry, how are your hands today? Let me see them,” she said.
“They’re fine,” I said. I wasn’t about to show them to her and have her fuss over me in front of her dad.
As we neared the school, we saw a large group of kids bunched up in front of the door waiting for the bell. They were talking a mile a minute. It didn’t take long to find out what they were buzzing about.
“Hey, Harry. Did you hear about Mrs. Carmichael’s baby buggy?” Bucky said. “Somebody tied it to the church steeple on Halloween.”
Our prank seemed ages ago after all that had happened. “The church steeple! Really?” I pretended surprise. “Who did it, I wonder?”
“Nobody knows for sure, but I think it serves that old lady right. Don’t you?”
I nodded. “I guess so.”
Rumors ran through the group with everyone speculating on who did it. Somebody heard it was a gang from Sioux City; others thought maybe it was the Ku Klux Klan. I avoided looking at Harold and Sam, afraid I might give away our secret. Or afraid they might.
Bucky called to Frank Halverson who stood off to the side, always an outsider in this group. “Hey, Frank. Did you get your dad’s KKK guys to hang up that buggy?”
Frank’s little-bitty eyes lit up when someone talked to him. “No, it wasn’t them,” he said. “They had bigger fish to fry last weekend.” A flash of anger went through me. Was he talking about what happened to us? Could my father possibly be associated with his dad? Frank preened and strutted around just begging someone to ask what his dad’s KKK bunch had done, and, of course, someone did.
“I’m not supposed to say,” he said, but it was clear that he was busting to tell and had to work hard to keep his secret. When attention shifted away from him after a few minutes, he said, “I might tell if somebody’d give me a dollar.”
“Nobody’s gonna give you a dollar to hear your stupid secret,” Sam said.
The bell rang just then, and we went inside.
I was still thinking about Frank’s words when, halfway through algebra class, the school secretary came into our room and spoke to Mr. Hummel. He listened a moment, then said, “Harry, Mr. Lyman would like to see you in his office. You can go with Mrs. Tate. Take your books with you.”
Mr. Lyman must have heard about the Klan attack on the store. He probably wanted to ask how Granddad was. Everyone’s eyes were glued on me as I followed Mrs. Tate out of the room.
The principal was standing behind his big, bare desk, holding a wooden ruler in his hand. His face, always mean looking, was red and more bunched up than us
ual. I figured out that this was not about our store. He said nothing for a few moments, just slapped that ruler into the palm of his other hand from time to time while I stood. When he had made me thoroughly nervous and uncomfortable, he laid the ruler down, reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a tablet.
“Harry, do you recognize this?”
Oh God! It was my tablet. A rush of heat raced through my body. My heart thrummed in my head, and I felt a desperate need to urinate. I knew exactly what this was about, and it wasn’t the Klan attack.
“Answer me, young man. Do you recognize this?”
I croaked out a raspy “Yessir” and swallowed hard, my mouth dry.
“Well, what is it?”
“It’s a tablet, sir.”
“I know that, Harry. Don’t be fresh. Whose tablet is it?”
“It’s mine, sir.”
He nodded in agreement. “Yes, I thought so since it has your name on it. How do you suppose I got it? You must have left it someplace.” He gave me a sly look. We both knew I was cornered.
“I dunno, sir.” But I did know. I’d left it on the steps of the church. I knew it the instant I saw it. We’d been so pleased after we got the buggy up, I forgot all about the tablet. Now someone had found it, and I was in trouble. I felt stupid, stupid, stupid.
“It has some interesting drawings in it.” Mr. Lyman thrust a page with a church sketch in my face. “Did you make this?”
“Uh, yessir.”
“And this one?” He flipped to the next page.
I nodded.
“Speak up, Harry.”
“Yessir.”
“Why did you make these drawings of the church?”
“I dunno.”
He leaned toward me, his cheeks aflame. Bits of spittle glistened on his thick lips. I had never noticed the wart beside his nose before. Now, as I stared, it seemed to grow larger and larger. Some part of my brain wondered if it would pop.
“I think you do know why you drew those pictures, Harry. You planned the whole thing with Mrs. Carmichael’s buggy, didn’t you?” His voice thundered in my ears. “Answer me, Harry. Did you plan that thievery, that cruel trick?”
I gulped, swallowed, and said nothing.
“You will not leave here until you tell me.”
At last I whispered, “She yelled at us all the time.” I felt weak in the legs and wanted to sit down, but I didn’t dare.
“Is that any reason to steal her property? To show such disrespect for the church? To put other people at risk? Those men had to climb up there and undo your prank. That was dangerous. What kind of boy are you to be so thoughtless?”
I hung my head, hating every minute of this.
“You’ve probably gotten other boys in trouble with your schemes. Their parents won’t want their sons to be in school with such a troublemaker. What will your grandparents think? They’ve sacrificed a lot so you could attend high school.”
I felt his words pelting me like bits of hail in a thunderstorm, but they didn’t register anymore. I stopped listening and stood there dumbly, waiting for him to stop, just like I’d learned to do with my dad when he ranted. In my misery I scarcely noticed when the room went quiet.
He finally quit, his temper used up. He lowered his voice and said, “What do you have to say for yourself, Harry?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Well, I have an idea. Since you don’t know what to say, I’m going to give you some time to think it over.” He pointed to a small anteroom to his office with a table and two chairs.
“I want you to go in there and think about what you’ve done. Then I want you to write a letter to Mrs. Carmichael explaining it to her. You and I will deliver it to her. We’re going to talk about this some more, Harry. We are not done with this thing. You’re going to tell me who else was involved and exactly how you did it.” He handed me paper and pencil and turned to leave.
“Please, Mr. Lyman, sir. Please, I…I need to use the restroom.”
He turned back, a look of disgust on his face, but he must have realized my need was real. He pinched a piece of my shirtsleeve between two fingers as if he were holding up a dead mouse, and said, “March.”
And march we did, down the long hall to the restroom with him holding on to me all the way. Classes were letting out and people stared at us goggle-eyed. It was the most humiliating thing I’d ever experienced, but I needed relief. The restroom was blessedly empty and I hung on to the washbasin a few extra seconds trying to get myself calmed down. Then we went back to his office, and I sat alone at the table with the paper and pencil.
I thought about what to say and finally picked up the pencil and wrote the date, November 3, 1923. I knew I should write Dear Mrs. Carmichael. Why did I have to do that? She wasn’t dear to me. I hated her. I hadn’t before, but I did now. After a minute or so, I swallowed hard and wrote.
Dear Mrs. Carmichael,
I am the boy who took your buggy last Friday night. I heard you got it back with no damage to it, and nobody got hurt. It was a Halloween joke is all.
Harry Spencer
When Mr. Lyman returned, he said, “Well, Harry. Is this your letter?” He picked it up from the table and read it, then let me have it. “Listen here, young man. This won’t do. Your letter expresses no regret, no apology of any kind for what you did.”
“You told me to explain it to her, sir. I thought that’s what I did.”
“You are an insolent, intractable boy.” The color rose up in his cheeks again. “You will sit here until you write an acceptable letter if it takes you the rest of the day. Do you hear me?”
“Yessir.”
He slammed out of the room, and I enjoyed myself for a minute or two, knowing I had gotten under his skin. Then I thought about my situation. Everything was a mess at home after the store attack. I still worried that Dad had participated, and now it was a mess at school. I sure didn’t want to spend any more time here, so I decided to write the letter he wanted and get it over with. But I felt something harden in me at the same time. I resolved that I would not tell him the names of the other boys, no matter what he did to me. That much I knew for certain.
A little later, the two of us walked to the Carmichael house, Mr. Lyman carrying my satisfactory letter in his hand. When she came to the door he said, “Mrs. Carmichael, this is Harry Spencer. He has something he wants to say to you.” She turned to me with cold, unfriendly look. I didn’t want to say it, but I finally did.
“I’m sorry I took your baby buggy.” The words came out in a hurry. “It was a joke for Halloween.”
“Hmph. You had your nerve. Stealing my property right off my back porch.”
I wanted to say, “You got it back, didn’t you?” but of course I didn’t.
Mr. Lyman said, “Harry’s written a letter of apology, and, on behalf of the school, I offer my apologies too. I want you to know that we don’t approve of this kind of behavior.” He handed her the letter. She stood, her mouth open like she had a lot more to say, but all that came out was a weak, “Okay.” She shut the door, and we turned and left.
Back in his office, I figured I was to get another grilling, but Mrs. Tate stopped him as we came in, and they had a whispered conversation. He seemed uncertain what to do, but finally said, “Harry, get your things.”
We walked down the hall together and he found a seat for me in the back of the library. He told me I was to stay there the rest of the afternoon and that I was suspended from school for three days. Then he hurried off.
I had steeled myself for all the “who” and “how” questions, but it seemed like it wasn’t going to happen. I took out my English book and tried to read the assignment. I would read a paragraph or two, and then I would relive Mr. Lyman’s scolding. I would try it again, then I would think about what I was going to tell Carol Ann. My folks. It was a very long afternoon.
When the bell finally rang at four, I gathered up my belongings. Mr. Hummel came in
and motioned for me to go with him. I followed him to his classroom and he told me to have a seat. He said, “Mr. Lyman had to leave this afternoon and take the train to Omaha. His mother is very sick and may die. He left me in charge.”
That was good news as far as I was concerned.
He sat down on his desk, his feet dangling over the side. “I understand you’ve had a pretty terrible time lately, Harry. I’m sorry.”
I hung my head. These were the most sympathetic words I’d heard in a while.
“You performed quite a prank, you fellows.” He smiled a little. “It was dangerous and dumb, but, in my book, it wasn’t evil. It was mischief.” He held up a hand to stop any word from me. “Harold and Sam told me what happened. They didn’t think you should be the only one punished for it. They also told me why you did it. To keep the KKK from going after Mrs. Carmichael. Is that right?”
I nodded, grateful for his understanding.
“Now, about this suspension thing. I think that, under the circumstances, a three-day suspension isn’t warranted. I’ve told Harold and Sam to stay home tomorrow, and I want you to do that too. Let this thing blow over.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hummel.” It seemed like a knot inside me loosened when he said that. I wanted to hug him, but I didn’t figure it was the right thing to do.
“There’s just one last thing I’d like you to know, Harry. It’s about Mrs. Carmichael. I know you fellows think she behaves oddly, but listen. About two weeks before school started, her husband had a bad accident. He’s a brakeman for the railroad, and he fell off the train somehow. They thought he was going to die. They took him to St. Paul where he had an operation. He’s lost one leg, but he’s going to live and will be home soon.”
I put my hands over my eyes. “I feel like a real jerk, Mr. Hummel. I’m really sorry for the dumb thing I did.”
“I knew you would be, Harry. I knew you would be.” He patted me on the shoulder and told me I could go. “Thanks,” I said and took off like a scared rabbit afraid I might break down.
