The Outhouse Gang

by Neil Plakcy

  * * *

  That afternoon, after most of the mourners had gone, Charley walked out to the barn alone. There, in the center of the floor, was the mechanical picker, in pieces, as his mother had said. The picker was old, a relic his father had gotten cheap when it got too hard to pick the corn by hand.

  He lifted the picking arm and scanned it carefully. It had two hairline cracks, and one end of it seemed bent out of shape. He had no idea how the pieces fit back together. He took the arm and hefted it in his right hand. “Damn!” he said, and flung it out through the barn door. It landed with a clang at the edge of the asphalt drive.

  The next day Charley stopped in at the hardware store to ask Chuck Ritter for advice about the picker. Chuck took one look at the make and model number and said, “Sorry, buck, I can’t help you. Nobody’s made one like this for years.”

  “But how do I get the corn in?” Charley asked. “You know anybody who’s got a picker I can rent?”

  Chuck shook his head. “Bad time of year to look for a corn picker. What with everybody’s crop coming in.”

  Charley stared down at the counter. “Don’t worry,” Chuck said. “We can pick it by hand. I’ll round up some folks. You think it’ll be ready by Saturday?”

  “I’m not sure,” Charley said. “Pop was the one who always decided when to pick.”

  “I’ll ask my dad to take a look,” Chuck said. “He grew up on a farm, after all. He’ll know.” He put his hand on Charley’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, buck, you’ll make it through.”

  “Wish I could be sure,” Charley said.

  * * *

  By Saturday morning Chuck had rounded up all the Woodruffs’ neighbors, and a lot of people from town as well. Little kids played in the yard around the farmhouse, while the older ones stayed together and told each other stories in the secret language of teenagers. Everybody was wearing jeans and old shirts, eager to get out in the fields, dig their feet into the rich, loamy soil, break the ears out of their spiky nests and dump them into canvas sacks.

  Chuck Ritter’s father Hal stood at the bottom of the drive as the people drove up, with a couple of ears of corn and a big stalk he’d cut from the edge of the field. He was a stooped old man with a thatch of gray hair and a pronounced limp. As Charley stood by and watched, Hal showed the town folks, like Sandy Lord, the attorney, and his wife Helene, how to tell which ears were ripe, and how to break them out. Hal sent crews down every furrow, handing out shoulder sacks and big bushel baskets for the end of each row.

  “I appreciate this,” Charley said, when there was a temporary break in the flow. “I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “Your father was a good man,” Hal said.

  Charley nodded. “I know.”

  * * *

  It was a beautiful day, the sun warm and high in the sky, a cool breeze drifting through the green stalks. The Pennsbury High football game against Neshaminy was on WBUD out of Trenton, just across the Delaware, and somebody had a transistor radio going out in the middle of the field, the volume turned way up. When Pennsbury made a touchdown, everybody cheered. At half-time, the marching band played “The Twist,” by Chubby Checker, and some of the teenagers stopped picking to dance.

  By four-thirty the crop was in. Wearing an apron over her flowered dress, Charley’s mother boiled up gallons of hot water and Charley and Chuck and a couple of the other guys stripped dozens of the ears, tearing open the rippled husks, picking away at the smooth yellow silk until the kernels shone clean.

  After everybody had been served, Charley walked out behind the kitchen, where Paul and Elaine Warner were sitting on the grass eating, with their seven-year-old, Dennis. A thin trail of butter dripped down Dennis’ chin. “This is the best corn I ever tasted,” Paul said, stopping for a minute as Charley passed.

  “Pop knew how to grow corn,” Charley said. He stood next to the Warners and surveyed the fields. He had decided to let the stalks go brown, then plow the field under just before cold weather set in, and sell out before spring planting.

  “How come you didn’t want to take over the land?” Paul asked.

  Charley frowned. “I never wanted be a farmer. I didn’t have the patience for it.” He remembered the cycle his father had gone through, year after year—putting the seed in the ground and then working the land, praying for the right amount of sun and rain, and then, after months of work, maybe pulling out a good harvest. “And I saw how hard it was on Pop, especially in years when the crop was poor.”

  “I can see how you’d get discouraged,” Paul said.

  “Even when I was little, I’d find a scrap of wood and start whittling on it. I used to make toys for the other kids, whistles and tops and slingshots. Then when I got to high school and discovered shop class, I started to make furniture, and I loved it.” Charley laughed. “Most of the kids were making shelves and footstools, and I was making tables and selling them. That’s when Pop said I was too good with my hands to use them pushing dirt.”

  Paul stood up. “Come on, sport, let’s see if we can find a bathroom and wash these hands,” he said to Dennis. As they turned toward the house, Charley walked out into the field, among the empty green stalks.

  How his father had loved the corn, watching it rise up out of the dirt, grow strong green leaves and rich yellow ears, then harvesting it and feeding it to his family. Charley finally understood that he was not that different from his father after all. The best thing about making furniture, he thought, was seeing something in a piece of wood, and then forming it to fit that vision, just as his father had envisioned these green fields and then pulled them out of the earth. And there was the same reward in the work itself, in doing a hard job that you enjoyed and that fed your family. For the first time since that five a.m. call, Charley felt good.

  * * *

  The next day Helene Lord, who was the bookkeeper at the lumber yard, helped Charley sort out his father’s financial records. “I’m sorry,” she said, when they’d come down to the bottom line. “I wish the news were better. Your father owed a lot of money.”

  “I never realized how deep in debt he was. He must have been borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.” After Helene left, Charley sat up for hours in the kitchen, staring at the figures, hoping they would show him something different. The farm was mortgaged so heavily he would have to get top dollar for it to break even. Most of the equipment had been bought on credit, and the only pieces his father had owned outright were the ones, like the corn picker, that were old and worn out.

  Thankfully there’d be enough left so that his mother could buy her own place, not have to move in with him and Connie. She’d have to live on her Social Security, though, and it wouldn’t be easy.

  And she’d depend on him, too. His father had always been the boss in the marriage. He’d made all the decisions, and his word was law. At 58, how could he expect his mother to begin making her own choices, for the first time in her life?

  There was Connie, too, and Raymond, depending on him. Connie’s pregnancy had been hard, and Raymond was a sickly baby, so she hadn’t gone back to work yet. They were living on what he made at the furniture factory, and the little money he eked out on weekends doing custom cabinet work and home repairs.

  “Charley?” Connie asked, coming into the kitchen in her nightgown. He looked up at the clock. He hadn’t realized it was after midnight.

  “How does it look?” she asked.

  With her hair down, she looked so sweet and young, almost a teenager. She came over and put her arm around his shoulders, and he leaned back against her.

  After a while, Charley said, “I never knew it was so bad. He never let on.”

  “That’s the way he was,” Connie said. “You know that. He was the kind of man who, if he was drowning, wouldn’t have asked for a life raft from anybody. He’d have figured if he couldn’t save his own sorry ass, it wasn’t worth saving.”

  Charley smiled. “You sound just like him.”

  “You’re a
different sort of person, Charley. At least I hope you are. We’re a team, you and me. I don’t want there to ever be secrets between us.”

  “You know what really worries me?” Charley sat up straight, and Connie came around the table to sit across from him. “He worked hard all his life and this is all he got. What if, some time from now, you’re sitting at this table with Raymond, and I’m gone, and I can’t leave you any more than this.”

  “You can’t judge a person’s life by how much money they leave behind when they’re gone,” Connie said. “Your father was a good man. He took care of you and your mother. He could raise the sweetest corn I’ve ever tasted. I think his life could stack up against anybody’s.”

  “He never came out and told me he loved me, but I knew,” Charley said. “And sometimes he’d be sitting on the sofa with Mom, watching TV, and he’d reach over and take her hand, and she’d look at him so sweet. He didn’t have much, but I guess it was enough.”

  * * *

  Charlie listed the farm with Elaine Warner, who was a saleswoman with a real estate agency in the center of Stewart’s Crossing. By mid-October she had found a buyer, a housing developer, and she found Mrs. Woodruff a bungalow on the south side of town, only a few blocks from the river. She helped Charley and his mother organize a yard sale to clear out the big old farmhouse.

  The day of the yard sale it was cold and rainy in the early predawn hours, when Charley was tossing and turning in bed, worrying about the price he’d gotten for the farm, but by the time daylight arrived the storm had passed over, leaving the air clean and fresh. When he finished showering, a few minutes past eight, Connie was sitting at the kitchen table feeding Raymond pureed bananas. He knocked her arm, and she spilled bananas on her white blouse.

  “Oh, Raymond,” she said. “Look what you’ve done.”

  “I’ll finish up with him. You go change your blouse. We should have left here already.”

  “All I have that’s clean is that pink one with the Peter Pan collar. Do you think that’ll be all right?”

  “What’s a Peter Pan collar?” Charley asked. He sat down next to Raymond and started to feed him.

  “You’ll see it in a minute,” Connie called from the bedroom.

  The phone rang. “There are already people here,” his mother said. “I told them the sale doesn’t start until nine o’clock and they said they’d wait, but I don’t know what to do.”

  “We’re leaving in a few minutes,” Charley said. “We’ll be right there.”

  By the time they got to the farm, Elaine Warner was standing in the driveway directing traffic. “You look so chic,” Connie said, getting out of the car. “That sheath really suits you. And I love your scarf.” She walked quickly up to the house.

  “You’re lucky you’ve got so much land for parking,” Elaine said, as Charley got Raymond out of his carrier seat. “At least once a month, one of our clients sells a house and has a sale, and there’s never enough parking.”

  She diverted her attention to a red Volkswagen Beetle that was trying to go all the way up the driveway. “I told you to park back there,” she said, planting herself firmly in their path. “You might just as well back up, because you’re not getting past me.”

  Carrying Raymond, Charley hurried up to the house. Tom Laroquette was setting up folding tables in front of the garage, and as soon as he set one up, Jenny brought boxes out for it. A few of the customers were so eager to see what was inside that they were opening the boxes themselves. Connie started directing them.

  Charley found his mother in the kitchen. “Here, let me take him,” she said, holding her arms out for Raymond.

  Charley handed the child to his mother. “Are you going outside?” he asked. “You ought to make sure we aren’t selling anything you want to keep.”

  “I think I’ll stay in here for a while,” his mother said. “Where I have this little boy to keep me company.” Charley looked doubtful. “I’d rather not have to see everything laid out. I’ll be all right. You go look through the tools.”

  Charley set a half-dozen two-by-fours on sawhorses outside the barn, and laid out everything he was selling. He kept a lot of the woodworking tools, the planes, the routers and the files, and a hammer with a handle he’d made for his father one year for Christmas. He left the bigger pieces on the hard dirt around the front of the barn doors.

  Paul Warner and Sandy Lord were among the first customers, and they bought up a lot of the hand tools. “Listen, Charley, about your father’s will,” Sandy said. “I just want to let you know there’s no charge for the probate.”

  “That’s not right,” Charley said. “I want to pay you what I owe you.”

  “You’ll make it up to me,” Sandy said. “I could use some new cabinets in my office. After things have quieted down, come on over and take a look.”

  “I will.” Charley watched the cash box while Tom Laroquette negotiated with the buyers. Tom was a smooth salesman, convincing people of the merits of machinery he didn’t quite understand himself.

  Around eleven o’clock Chuck Ritter came by with a handful of yellow sheets of paper. “I’m giving these back to you,” he said. “I don’t want to hear any arguing.”

  Charley took the papers and looked at them. “These are invoices,” he said. “Bills Pop owed you.”

  “I know,” Chuck said. “Listen, your dad and mine went back a long time.” He nodded his head toward the front of the house. Hal Ritter had just gotten out of his new Cadillac. They watched him walk up to the front porch and say something to Mrs. Woodruff. She started to cry and he held her in his arms and said something to her.

  “Thanks,” Charley said. “For everything.”

  * * *

  The tools sold out by midafternoon, and Charley lounged by the side of the garage with Tom Laroquette and Harry Mosca, watching the people eagerly searching for bargains.

  “Like a pack of vultures,” Tom said.

  “Used to be that things stayed in families,” Harry said. “Half the things Jane and I started out with came as hand-me-downs. Nowadays everybody wants new.”

  Charley watched a couple struggle down the driveway with his father’s imitation-leather recliner, load it into a pick-up, and drive away. From the time when they got their first black-and-white TV, he remembered his father relaxing in that chair every night, watching Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca on Your Show of Shows, laughing over Uncle Miltie’s antics or Lucy’s wild schemes.

  It seemed to Charley like pieces of his life were drifting away. There went the Bavarian cuckoo clock his great-uncle had brought back from World War I. The matching curtains and bedspread from his room, with their scenes of Revolutionary War battles, went off to populate some other child’s dreams. Someone even bought a souvenir plate from the Poconos, a relic of the one family vacation the Woodruffs had ever taken.

  When the crowd eased, Jenny Laroquette came over to the men for a break. She looked efficient and yet casual, in a pair of stiff new jeans and a blue-and-white striped shirt of Tom’s. “This place has been a madhouse,” she said. “Worse than campaign headquarters on election night.” Jenny had just received her degree in political science. She worked part-time in the office of their state senator.

  “You know women when they smell a bargain,” Tom said.

  “That’ll be quite enough out of you, Mr. Laroquette,” she said. “Actually, it’s your friend here I would like to speak with. Come take a walk with me, Charley.”

  Tom hummed a funeral dirge. “It was nice knowing you, pal.”

  Jenny pinched his chest. “I’ll deal with you later.”

  They walked toward the stripped fields. “I know this has hit you hard, your father and all,” Jenny said. “But you have to take care of Connie, too. She looks so tired.” They turned after a few feet and looked back toward the house, where Connie was leaning against the wall, behind a table filled with rows of unmatched glasses, jelly jars and gas station giveaways, and a set of flower-patterned dishes
that had belonged to Charley’s grandmother. Connie’s hair was limp and tangled, and there were bags under her eyes. Even Charley could see that the pink top didn’t go with the flowered slacks she was wearing.

  “You don’t know what I’m going through,” Charley said. “Things are hard now. And Connie’s not complaining.”

  “Just because she’s not complaining doesn’t mean she’s not unhappy,” Jenny said. “Be careful, Charley. You look after my cousin, or you may find yourself losing more than just your father.” She turned and walked back toward the house.

  Charley walked on, out into the fields his father had tilled, seeded and harvested for over thirty years. The stalks lay crisscrossed all around him, where the wind had knocked them down. He picked one up, brushing away the dirt that dangled from its roots, and, in a quick motion, snapped it across his knee. He threw down the pieces, brushed his hands on his pants, and then turned to look back up at the house.

  * * *

  By dark the sale was over and the temperature had started to drop. Whatever hadn’t been sold was boxed up for donation to the Rescue Mission. The Laroquettes and the Woodruffs relaxed in the living room of the farmhouse, even though most of the furniture was gone. Tom and Jenny sat in front of the fireplace on a couple of big cushions, and Charley and Connie sat on gold velour wing chairs that Mrs. Woodruff was going to keep.

  “I’d say we did pretty well today,” Tom said, holding up the cash box. “Final count is $2,012.50.”

  “Fifty cents?” Charley asked.

  “We had a lot of low-ticket items,” Tom said. “Of course, we had some big-ticket items too. The dining room set, for example.”

  “So much has happened in this last year,” Charley said. “I mean, a year ago, who’d have thought that Kennedy and my dad would both be dead?”

  “I still cry sometimes when I see his picture,” Jenny said. “JFK, I mean. He made me believe in the future.”

  “He made you want to join the Peace Corps,” Tom said. “Did you know, Connie, your cousin wanted us both to volunteer to teach English in Africa somewhere, or build shelters in the Philippines, or bring American agricultural methods to Borneo.”