by Karen Wolff
I grinned and shook my head.
“Still carrying the torch, I guess,” he said. “You’ll get over it soon enough. Let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll fix you up.”
Sometimes the girls were so bold I could hardly believe it.
“I’ll go to the dance with you, Harry,” Betsy said.
“Don’t go with her, Harry,” said Carleen. “I’m lots more fun that she is. And I’m a better dancer.”
“If you go with her, I’ll tell Carol Ann,” said Pearl who had been Carol Ann’s best friend.
I laughed. “I think I’d better go to the dance stag. That way I can dance with all of you.” I enjoyed their flirting. It was all silliness and we knew it, but without these friends it would be a long slog until graduation in May.
Mrs. Kleinsasser, who’d been my English teacher since my freshman year, had retired over the summer. I missed her. She was tough on us, but underneath, she was kindhearted. I smiled to remember the time I fell asleep in her class. She’d tried to be stern about it, but I could tell she was laughing on the inside.
Her replacement, Mr. Wakeman, made me miss her even more. He was tall and skinny, with pale reddish hair, and a narrow, sharp nose. His shirt hung loosely around his scrawny neck, and he wore the same tie every day. Mr. Wakeman did not smile, nor did his watery eyes behind his glasses ever look at us directly. Even after three weeks, he still had to refer to his seating chart before he could call on us by name.
He had us reading Julius Caesar out loud, and I was assigned the role of Cassius. He kept us reading for the whole class period while he sat staring at the book. When the bell rang signifying it was time for lunch, I said, “I have a lean and hungry look.” Everyone laughed except Mr. Wakeman. He just blinked uncertainly as we filed out.
I wondered what made him decide to be a teacher. He seemed so humorless and uninterested in his students. How was it that people ended up doing the things they did? So many fellows I knew just happened into their work by chance, not as if they planned it, and they never amounted to much of anything. I didn’t want my life to be that way. Day after day as we waded through Shakespeare in his class, I wondered if I’d made a mistake not to accept Mr. Steele’s offer. How on earth could studying a play prepare me for a job?
But then in Mr. Hummel’s math class, I felt entirely different. He offered a new course that fall. “We’re going to use math to learn about the business of business,” he said. He told us about banks, about savings accounts, and checking accounts. He made up forms that looked like checks so he could teach us how to fill them out. Most kids’ parents paid their bills with cash, so this was new to them.
“I know how to do that,” I said. I’d watched Gram and Granddad often enough. But I found out I didn’t know as much as I thought.
“You have to write the amount for the check in two ways,” Mr. Hummel explained. “Suppose the bill is for $30. First you write it out in words.” He wrote “Thirty dollars” on the blackboard. “Then you must write it in numerical form.” He wrote “$30.00” on the board.
As always with me, the numbers came easily, but I had to practice with the other students writing out the amounts in words. He made the examples more and more difficult. The last one was for $5,135.26.
Jimmy Harper said, “Wow! I’ll never have that much money in my whole life.”
“I will. And more, I hope,” I muttered under my breath.
When Mr. Hummel was satisfied with our work, he said, “Now I want each of you to assume you have a checking account with seventy-five dollars in it. From that, you should buy ten items, anything you want, and write pretend checks for them.”
It was great fun dreaming up all the things we would buy if we had the money, but then came the reckoning when we had to balance our accounts. I was amazed that some kids spent more money than they had.
“Nosiree,” Mr. Hummel would say to them. “That’s an overdraft. You can’t get by with that.”
That’s when we learned about credit and borrowing money. What an eye opener! Gram and Granddad were so opposed to borrowing, they made it seem almost immoral when, once in a while, they had to take out a loan, but here was Mr. Hummel talking about it as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “Banks charge interest for the use of their money, and they pay interest to savers,” he said, “but they never pay out as much as they charge for loans.”
At first that didn’t seem fair to me, but Mr. Hummel said, “That’s where their profit lies, Harry. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in business.”
I hadn’t really thought of a bank as a business before, but now I could see that it was. A bank was in the money business just like Mr. Steele was in the appliance business.
All this talk made me hungrier than ever to have a business of my own. How could I start one? Could a kid like me get credit at a bank? I’d have to ask Mr. Hummel.
ONE NIGHT AS Ty and I were getting ready for bed, he told me that Dad’s grumpiness was getting worse.
“Sally thinks it’s because he doesn’t have enough to do now that you don’t need him to keep your books. She says he’ll go for hours without saying a word. Just sits around looking mean.”
I knew that look all too well, but I didn’t know what I could do about it. “He needs a job,” I said, knowing there wasn’t anything in Richmond for him. “I wish we lived closer to a bank. He could keep books for it. I’ve learned a lot about how they operate, and I think it would suit him just right.”
“Yeah, that would be nice,” Ty said, “but how to get him near one. Did you know he bought himself a shotgun?”
“No. What’s he plan to do with that?”
“Says he wants to go hunting. He goes off for a whole day by himself. Never says where he’s going. Hasn’t brought back so much as a rabbit.”
“I don’t see how he could shoot the thing one armed. Let alone hit something.”
“I’ll tell you something else that’s crazy,” Ty went on. “I took his clean clothes over there the other day. He was out on one of his rambles, so Sally said I might as well hang them up for him. In the back of his closet I saw his old KKK robe. Couldn’t help noticing that the bottom of it was all dirty, so I knew he’d worn it. Even the sleeves were stained with something.”
That was an unsettling thought. The Klavern in Richmond had gone out of business three years ago after the store attack. I wondered why he had hung on to the darn thing all this time.
“Do you suppose he just forgot about it?” Ty said.
“Doesn’t seem likely.”
Ty yawned and began to empty his pockets onto a little table near our daybed. He shucked his pants and climbed into bed. I took off my own pants, and, when I went to turn off the light, I happened to glance at Ty’s stuff lying there. Amidst the clutter of his jackknife, matches, a handkerchief, and some change, one of the coins caught my eye. It was about the size of a quarter, but it had a hole in the center of it. I’d seen that coin before. But where? I turned out the light and crawled into my side of the bed, wondering about it, but I was soon asleep.
In the middle of the night I awoke having dreamed that Buster was at the foot of our bed growling at something. How I wished it were true and that I could reach down and pet him. I heard leaves skittering against the window and got up to look. The whiteness of the moonlight made every tree and bush stand out clear as day, but there was nothing suspicious or unusual out there. As I turned to go back to bed, I saw Ty’s strange coin glittering in the cold light and realized that I recognized it. It was Dad’s coin, the one with the Kaiser’s head on it. The one he had shown me so many years ago. How had Ty gotten hold of it? I wanted to shake him awake to find out, but then I thought, “No. It’ll keep. I’ll ask him tomorrow.”
GRANDDAD AWOKE IN the morning coughing and wheezing with a recurrence of pleurisy, something that seemed to hit him every year with the onset of cold weather. He sat in the rocking chair, wrapped in a quilt, while Gram built up the fire in the cook-stove.
“Can you boys fix your own breakfast? I’ve got to get some water boiling. The steam helps him breathe,” she said.
I went out to pump a couple buckets of water for her while Ty ate bread and molasses and hurried to open the store. In all the commotion, I forgot to ask him about Dad’s coin. It was still early, so I ran over to the store before leaving for school.
Ty was grinding coffee and looked up surprised to see me. “What happened? Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he’ll be better once Gram gets the place steamed up. But I want to ask you about something else. Last night when we were going to bed, I saw a coin with a hole in it with the stuff from your pocket.”
“You mean this one?” He pulled it out of his pocket. “What about it?”
“Did Dad give it to you? Did you know it belonged to him?”
“No. I didn’t know that. I found it a long time ago and just hung on to it.”
I told Ty what Dad had said about taking the coin off a dead German and how he’d put a hole in it so he could say he’d put a spike through the Kaiser’s head.
Ty looked at it carefully. “Yeah, I can see where the head was.” He shrugged. “He’s just plain crazy, isn’t he?”
“It seems like it sometimes. Where’d you find it? Over at Sally’s?”
“No.” he said slowly. “I can tell you exactly where I found it. It was the morning after the KKK attacked us. You were asleep on the porch, so I came over here to the store and walked all around.” He paused.
I didn’t like to conjure up those painful memories, but I wanted to hear it all.
“I got over here by the porch and squatted to look at that big rock where Granddad and Buster went down. One of them must have hit it ‘cause it had blood all over it. That’s where I found the coin in the mashed down grass.”
He stopped talking, and we stared at each other for a long moment.
“You think he was there that night?” Ty breathed.
“I’ve always wondered,” I said. “Now we know. He was there all right! Goddam it, Ty. He was there. Now we know for sure!”
Something hot and hard sprang loose in my belly. I felt its savage heat, and I screamed, “He was there!” I turned and ran wildly from the store toward Sally McVay’s house. “I’ll kill him” was in my head. “I’ll kill him.”
I heard Ty’s steps pounding behind me, and I ran faster. No one was going to stop me. We’d run a quarter of a mile before he reached me and grabbed my shirt, pulling me to my knees in the roadway. “Stop it, Harry. Just stop it,” he said, panting and breathless.
I stood up, breathing hard, and jerked away from him. “I hate him, Ty.”
“Okay. I understand. Just don’t do anything stupid. He’s crazy.”
We stood with our hands on our knees, catching our breath.
“I’ve got to get back to the store,” he said. “I left it standing wide open.”
I nodded, and after a few minutes, I turned around and followed. A cold wind swept through the empty December trees and dried my sweat. Ty went into the store, and I went over to the Ford. I should have gone to school, but I didn’t. I drove aimlessly around the county, reliving the horror of that awful night with Granddad hurt and Buster dead. I was sickened even more to realize my own father had played a part in it. The anger pumped up in me, hot and bitter, and I didn’t know what to do. All I could think about was getting away from the pain, away from him, away from this town. I drove and drove, speeding, taking curves recklessly until I was nearly out of gas.
I ended up at River Sioux. The place was deserted, the boats in storage, and the pavilion closed for the winter. The swings on the playground creaked forlornly in the chilly wind. I looked up to the roof where Carol Ann and I had loved each other last summer, and I felt a need for her that was at once so urgent and compelling that it forced me to think out a plan. And after a time, I knew what I must do.
GRANDDAD WAS BREATHING a little easier when I arrived home at the usual time. Gram asked me to deliver Dad’s laundry to him.
“I know how you feel about him, Harry, but please don’t do anything rash,” she said. “Anything you’ll regret. We’ve had enough trouble.”
“I know,” I said. I went to Sally McVay’s and would have handed the laundry through the door, but Dad wasn’t there, so I went back to his room. I just threw his stuff on the bed and went into the closet holding my breath, almost afraid to look, but I had to see. It was as Ty said. A dirty white robe and a tall hat standing in the corner. I picked up the right sleeve. It was torn and stained a rusty color. Blood! Granddad’s blood. I heard a sound and turned to see my father standing over me.
“What the hell are you doing, Harry? Get out of there.” His voice was rough and loud.
Blistering anger surged up in me again. “Why is this thing in here?” I said, pointing to the robe. “You’re still a member of that dirty Klan bunch, aren’t you? You haven’t given it up. You were in on the whole thing, weren’t you?”
“Wha… are you talking about? Get out of that closet.”
He moved toward me as if to yank me out. “Don’t you touch me,” I yelled. “I’ve got it figured it out. Ty found your Kaiser coin right in the very spot where Granddad and Buster went down. I know you were there, Dad!”
He stepped back, his shocked eyes dark and fixated on me. “You don’t know any such thing.”
“I figured it out, Dad. Before the attack, you never left this house. I saw you once at the church for the KKK convocation, maybe at Gram’s a couple of times for Sunday dinner. Otherwise you never left Sally’s. You never came near the store. Not ever.”
“So what? Where I go, or don’t go, is my business. Not yours.” His talk was tough, but his voice sounded less certain.
I looked hard at him. “Just tell me this. That coin with the hole in the center. How did it manage to get itself found off the end of the porch where Granddad got his leg busted? Where the best dog in the whole world got his back broke?”
My voice rose as I came closer to him. He lurched back and fell into his rocking chair, his eyes still wide and his mouth hanging open. I stood over him, seething with hatred.
“You can’t answer that, can you? That’s ‘cause you were there that night, Dad. You wore that ridiculous white sheet, and you went there. With that loathsome, hate-filled bunch who burned a cross in the yard and tried to burn down the store.” Saliva pooled in my mouth and wet my lips. I had to swallow before I could go on.
He looked stricken and groaned. “I can’t…I don’t know…” His voice tailed off.
“I’d bet my life you were on the porch with those others when Granddad got shoved and ended up with two broken bones and another one cracked.”
I heard the ugly, accusing tone in my voice. I glared as he wiped at his face with his good hand as if to push my words away. He looked down at the floor, and I knew he was guilty.
“I can still see those long, bloody scratches on Granddad’s back. We wondered what could have caused them? Well, I think I know. It was you with your hook that did it. Look here.” I grabbed the robe.
“It’s got blood stains on the sleeve. You shoved Granddad off that porch, shoved him on top of my dog, and then took off in your sheet like the yellow coward you are.”
“Stop, Harry. You don’t understand. You just don’t know,” he said, his voice puny now.
“You make me want to puke.”
He kept his hand over his eyes and no longer looked at me.
“You dumped Polly and me on Gram and Granddad so you could go do something you wanted to do. Never mind how abandoned we felt. Never mind that those two old people, who’d already raised their own kids, didn’t need two more to raise. Never mind that they had to buy our clothes and feed us. And still you came after them because of your crazy, stupid ideas about everything. You hurt them bad. Granddad will never walk right again. You ungrateful bastard.”
He swallowed hard. His voice was thick and choked when he spoke. “You got it w
rong, Harry. It’s not what you think.”
But I was caught up in the moment, and I kept on. I wanted to vent all those things I’d stored up in me for so long. I wanted to be rid of it like a bad sickness, and I didn’t quit.
“I hate you, Dad. I hate you for leaving us, for not being a father to us, for never even trying to get a job to take care of us. I’m sick of all your rants about everything and everybody.
“Tomorrow I’m going to pack up my stuff, and I’m going to get on the train to Kansas City. I’m going to leave you and Richmond behind forever, and I hope to God I never see you again.”
He looked up tears in his eyes. “No, Harry. Hold on…Harry,” he begged.
I roared on. “And I’ll tell you this. I’m going to do my best to make something of myself in this world. I’m going to do my best to forget about you. I’m never going to think about you again from this day on.”
I stomped out of his room and came face to face with Sally McVay. She had a hand over her mouth and her eyes looked frightened. She must have heard everything. I didn’t stop but marched out the door into the cold rain. I didn’t even feel it.
AT HOME, I told Gram what I planned to do. She pleaded with me not to leave. “You can’t be certain about what happened,” she said.
“We’ve proved it,” I said. “Ty and I figured it out because Dad lost his Kaiser coin that night. It was right there where Granddad went down. Don’t you see? He was there.”
“Cal wouldn’t hurt Granddad. He just wouldn’t. Please don’t do this, Harry,” she begged.
“I have to, Gram.”
I carried on packing my few belongings in an old suitcase. When I was finished, I went into the bedroom to say my goodbyes to Granddad. “I’m sorry, Granddad, but I’ve gotta leave this place.”
“I know,” he rasped. “Feeling the way you do, it’s probably for the best. Cal hasn’t been right since he got back from the war.”
That night Ty and I sat up for a long time while I told him what I’d said to Dad. Ty was the sort who just didn’t get as mad as I did. Especially about Dad. But I think he understood, in the end, why I had to go.
