The Outhouse Gang

by Neil Plakcy

  Some time later, Tom and Ellen knocked on his door. “We’ve come to an agreement,” Tom said. “I’m going to give up my internship and come work with you this summer. Ellen and I will be able to handle most things while you’re busy defending yourself.”

  “You’re making too big a deal out of this,” Sandy said. “In the first place, I’m not involved with the main crime. I’m only charged with aiding and abetting. They’re going to use me to try and flush Arthur out.”

  “Do you think he’ll give himself up?” Ellen asked.

  Sandy shook his head. “I think he’s already in some Latin American country where they don’t extradite embezzlers. He tried to protect me. He didn’t want to tell me what was up, but I insisted.”

  Ellen looked very worried. “What will you do if you can’t practice law any more, Daddy?”

  “I don’t want you to worry.” Sandy stood up, placed himself between his children, put an arm around each, and walked them out the door. He stood in the doorway until they had gone upstairs. Then he crossed the hall to the open door of the den. “Your turn,” he said into the shadows.

  “How’d you know I was there?” Danny asked.

  “How did you know to stand up for me?” Sandy asked. “You know me, I know you.” Leaving the lights off, he walked over to the sofa and sat down. “I appreciate what you did for me tonight. It’s good to know somebody’s in your court.”

  “Other kids’ parents lie to them,” Danny said. “Or they ignore them or avoid them. But you’ve always been straight with me.”

  “I’ve tried.”

  There was a long silence, which Sandy was not disposed to break. Finally Danny said, “I’ve smoked dope, you know.”

  “I’m not surprised. There’s a lot of that stuff around.”

  “And I shoplifted once. A couple of candy bars, for me and my friends.”

  Sandy sat back against the sofa and put his feet up on the coffee table. “It’s been interesting, watching you kids grow up,” he said. “You learn things at different rates. In some ways, you’re a lot smarter than your brother and your sister. And in some ways, you’ve still got a lot of catching up to do.”

  “Is this a lecture?”

  Sandy shrugged. “Not really. You know smoking dope is against the law, and you know shoplifting is, too. And you’ve heard me talk about enough cases to know what happens to people who break the law.”

  “Like the Outhouse Gang? They break the law, and nothing ever happens except people laugh.”

  Sandy sighed. “I’m not going to defend the Outhouse Gang. I know it’s wrong, and you know it’s wrong, and yet we keep going back, year after year.” He smiled. “If you decide to be a lawyer, too, I think you’d be a better one than Tommy or Ellen.”

  “You think so?”

  Sandy nodded. “You have a strong sense of right and wrong,” he said. “Moral outrage is good for a certain kind of attorney. Of course, one of the things you learn, if you go to law school, is how to channel that emotion into the ways the law allows. Me, I must have fallen asleep during that lecture.”

  “So you think you did what was right, even if it was against the law?” In the darkness, Sandy could see that Danny had turned to face him.

  “I do.”

  There was another pause. “Are you going to let Tommy work for you this summer?”

  Sandy shook his head. “He’s got a good job lined up. I won’t need him.” He gave his youngest son a sidelong glance. “Although, there may be too much work for Ellen to handle. Do you think you could give her a hand? That is, if it wouldn’t interfere with your extra-legal activities.”

  “That depends on how much you’re offering.”

  “I knew there was some of your mother in you, too,” Sandy said, laughing. “We’ll discuss what you’re worth when I see what you can do. Now come on, let’s go upstairs.”

  As they climbed, Sandy remembered a time when all his kids were small, when he had taken them out to the country, to a meeting with a client who ran an antique shop in an old barn outside New Hope. It was filled with junk, its teetering piles and sharp-edged debris a map of dangers for three adventurous kids. He could hardly concentrate on his client, an elderly Japanese man who had suffered interment in a camp in Nevada during the war and was considering a damage suit against the United States.

  Finally his client, Mr. Yasuda, put his hand on Sandy’s arm and said, “Relax, my friend. At the camp, I used to worry about my children. While I worked, what happened to them? Were they safe? What if the authorities chose to move them to a different camp while I worked? Every day, though, they were home when I returned, and I learned, finally, you cannot worry for others. You must do what you can to help them, and then get back to work.”

  He remembered Mr. Yasuda’s smile as he directed Sandy’s attention back to a draft of the suit. “And now, back to work?” he had asked.

  Sandy saw Danny to the stairs and said good night, and then went back into his den.

  Charley: 1978

  Every Memorial Day the Woodruffs went over to Connie’s brother Richard’s house for a big picnic with all her family. Richard owned a car dealership and had a big split-level on the north side of Stewart’s Crossing, in a fancy development that had been a farm when Charley was growing up.

  Connie loved to go over to her sister-in-law’s house early, leaving breakfast ready for Charley and the boys, and spend the morning making potato salad and cole slaw with her sisters, her cousins and her sisters-in-law. They baked pies, chopped vegetables, defrosted, boiled and roasted, while sharing stories and gossip.

  Charley felt left out. He spent the morning with the boys, Raymond, Jeffrey and Edward, maybe going for a walk or working on something in his shop. Then around noon he drove them over to Richard’s house where they abandoned him for the society of their first and second cousins. Sometimes Charley talked to Tom Laroquette, who was married to Connie’s cousin Jenny, and sometimes he just wandered off by himself.

  Charley was an only child, and his parents had always preferred the solitude of their farm to big family gatherings. The McNallys, Connie’s family, were always lively and boisterous, telling jokes and stories and laughing so hard sometimes their eyes teared. Charley thought sometimes that he had married Connie because she didn’t seem like a McNally at all, so quiet and shy and simple in her dress and her manners. He thought he was rescuing her from a life where she didn’t belong.

  But she did belong on those Memorial Days, much more than Charley did. He forgot the names of her cousins, couldn’t keep track of who was married to who, which one was the school teacher and which one was the foot doctor.

  Even his mother seemed to fit in more than he did. The McNallys had drawn her in to their extended family after Charley’s father died. She sat on the screened porch with Connie’s mother and a few other older women, reminiscing about past holidays and trading notes on their grandchildren.

  Charley spotted Tom looking at the cherry tree, which had been wrapped in white cheesecloth to protect the fruit from the birds, and he walked over that way. “You think it’s worth the trouble?” Tom asked, pointing at the tree. “I mean, you can buy the damn cherries at the supermarket.”

  Having grown up on a farm, Charley had a great respect for the growing of food. “Things taste better when you grow them yourself,” he said. “Didn’t you ever raise strawberries or tomatoes when you were a kid?”

  Tom shook his head. “We lived in the city. I saw a tree maybe once a week. That’s why I wanted to live out here, to give my kids what I didn’t have.” He paused, and shrugged. “Although, I have to tell you, the commute is beginning to kill me.”

  Two years before, Tom had taken a job in New York City, and joined the legions of men in suits who took the train in from Trenton every morning. “Jenny has applied for a job in the city, too, working for a big foundation that does research on public policy issues. If she gets it we may be moving.”

  “That’d be a shame,” C
harley said. “Andrew’s lived here all his life.”

  “I know,” Tom said, nodding. “But the house has a lot of memories in it, and we’re starting to think we need to move on.”

  Tom and Jenny Laroquette had taken Betsy’s loss hard. Andrew, who was twelve that year, had been hurt a lot, first by losing his little sister, then when his parents had retreated into their own pain. They’d started to come out of it recently, and Tom saw a move to a new place as the next logical step.

  Someone on the back porch was ringing a dinner bell, and Tom and Charley turned to walk back up to the house. Charley found Connie had saved a place for him at one of the big picnic tables by the back door, and he slid into it gratefully, ruffling the hair of his youngest son as he did.

  After dinner, Charley and his mother took a walk through the gathering twilight. All the houses in the neighborhood were large and well-kept, the lawns neatly manicured. As they passed one house, the sprinkler system kicked in, sending graceful arcs of water over the grass.

  Mrs. Woodruff did not see as well as she once did, and she walked more slowly every year. Nowadays when she and Charley went for a walk, she took his arm, and they proceeded at a slow and stately pace, covering less and less ground.

  “This is always such a nice event,” Mrs. Woodruff said. “It’s so sweet of the McNallys to keep on inviting me, old as I am.”

  “Mother. You’re not that old.”

  “Wait until you get to be my age to say that. By the time you reach sixty the years start to bear down on you. Ooh!” She held onto her side for a moment, and Charley could feel her holding her breath.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

  Mrs. Woodruff’s body relaxed. “Just a little pain. Nothing to worry about. Just my body telling me it’s time to turn around and go home.”

  Charley looked up. They had walked barely a block. He remembered past Memorial Days when they had walked the entire neighborhood, coming back only because it was so dark and late and the children would be anxious for bed. Gently he steered his mother in a circle, so that they were facing Richard’s house again. “Can you walk?” Charley asked. “I can come back for you in the car.”

  “Don’t be silly. I told you, I’m fine. Can’t a person have a little arthritis now and then?”

  “You have to take care of yourself,” Charley said, as they walked slowly back. “Without you, I’d be all alone.”

  “Why, Charley, what a curious thing to say,” Mrs. Woodruff said. “And just as we’re going back to a house full of family.”

  The driveway ahead of them was full of families returning to their cars, fathers carrying sleepy children, mothers waving good-bye under the halo of the corner lights. Charley guided his mother to her car, where she pronounced again that she was quite capable of driving home. Charley watched her taillights disappear down the long curving street.

  * * *

  Charley still made custom furniture and cabinets in his barn. His workmanship was careful and precise, and often pieces took longer to build than he had expected, so he worked late hours struggling to meet deadlines. He never advertised for clients, counting on word of mouth and the quality of his work to stand for him. Besides, he was a terrible salesman, tongue-tied and stammering, counting on the work of his hands to speak for him.

  As a consequence, his business was dying. New houses were being built all over the valley, north and south and west of Stewart’s Crossing. Even across the river in West Trenton, but Charley wasn’t getting any work there.

  He laid off two carpenters in May, and he had only one apprentice left. Late at night, after Connie had gone to bed, he paced around the living room and wondered what kind of a job he could get when the business went under.

  One afternoon in early June, Charley stood over his vise, sanding the edge of a bookshelf with a piece of very fine sandpaper. Behind him, in the back corner of the barn, his apprentice was using an electric saw, filling the room with a high noisy whine and the sweet smell of sawdust.

  Connie appeared in the doorway, framed in the harsh, slanting light of late afternoon. He squinted at her. “You’d better come into the house,” she said. “Your mom’s took sick.”

  It had been fourteen years since Charley’s father died, and since then his mother had been living in a bungalow down near the river, enjoying her freedom and the chance to spoil her grandchildren. She had always had a strong, farmwife’s constitution; she was the kind of woman who could go on about her work unbowed by illness or pain.

  He put the sandpaper down, rubbed his hands on his blue cotton work pants, and followed Connie back up the dirt path that led from the barn to the house. He had meant to put down flagstones there, but there was always something else to do. Time had a way of slipping away on you when you least expected it.

  On the way to the house, Connie explained. His mother’s neighbor, Mr. Benman, usually drove her to the grocery on Tuesdays. An hour before, when he’d knocked on her door, it had taken her a long time to answer, and when she did, she looked terrible. She told Benman that she had been in bed for two days with bad stomach pains. He had sent her back to rest and called Connie.

  Charley got cleaned up while Connie wrote a note for the boys, who were due home from school soon. At his mother’s house, he knocked loudly and then let himself in with his key. He and Connie found his mother in her bed, wearing a cotton nightgown. Her thin gray hair was splayed out against the pillow, and her bent, arthritic hands lay on top of the covers.

  “Momma, you look terrible,” Charley said, coming over to the bed. Her face was pale and drawn, and he could hear her labored breathing. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s nothing,” Mrs. Woodruff said. “It’ll pass.”

  Connie was already getting some clothes out for her. “We’re taking you to the doctor, Momma,” Charley said. “Can you sit up?”

  Slowly and carefully, Connie and Charley got Mrs. Woodruff out of bed and into her clothes. They walked her out to the car, stopping several times to let her catch her breath. Though the doctor’s waiting room was crowded, the nurse noted how bad Mrs. Woodruff looked and brought her in right away.

  The doctor asked Charley and Connie to come into his office. “Your mother looks very ill,” he said. “I’d like to admit her to the hospital for some tests. These pains she has in her stomach, they could be very serious.”

  “Where do we take her?” Charley asked.

  * * *

  The doctor who reviewed Mrs. Woodruff’s X-ray spotted the tumor in her stomach, and then a biopsy confirmed that it was cancerous. Charley was dazed, standing in the hospital waiting room while a young surgeon in green scrubs described the size and composition of the tumor.

  “It’s too big for us to remove surgically,” he said. “We’re going to put her on massive doses of radiation and chemotherapy and see if we can shrink it.” He looked at Charley and Connie and said, more gently, “I don’t think there’s a very good prognosis here. With early detection, we can save a lot of patients, but this condition has progressed very far.”

  “She’d never say she was sick,” Charley said. “She’d always just wave her hand at me and say she was fine, that I shouldn’t worry.”

  “Some people are like that,” the doctor said.

  “How long do you think she has, doctor?” Connie asked.

  The doctor frowned. “You can’t ever say for certain. So much depends on how the patient reacts to the treatment. But even in the best case, I think the most we can give her is three to six months.”

  After the doctor left, Charley and Connie went down to the coffee shop. “I’m going to call Momma,” Connie said, after they had sat down in a booth and ordered coffee.

  Charley looked up. “They said she’d be in the recovery room still.”

  “My Momma,” Connie said gently, putting her hand over Charley’s. “She said she wanted to know as soon as we heard anything.”

  Charley was vaguely annoyed as
Connie went off to the pay phone. After all, her mother was nothing to his, just the mother of someone her daughter had married. Why did she care?

  The waitress brought the coffee and Charley sat there, holding the cup in both hands and waiting for the liquid to cool. Connie came back from the phone a few minutes later. “Momma said to say hello.” She sat down and picked up her coffee. She took a cautionary sip, and then her shoulders relaxed and she drank deeply.

  “Louise is going to go over and meet the kids when they get home from school,” she continued. Louise was Connie’s older sister. “She’s organizing people to come and visit every day, once your Momma is well enough to have visitors. Evan is going to cut your Momma’s lawn with his riding mower, every week until she gets better.”

  “She isn’t going to get better.”

  “Why, Charles Emmett Woodruff,” Connie said. “What a terrible thing to say.”

  “It’s the truth. That doesn’t make it less terrible, but it’s got to be said. Soon I’m going to be an orphan.”

  “You can’t be an orphan,” Connie said. “You’re already grown up. Orphans are little children who have to live in homes.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, Connie. But I know that once my parents are both gone, I will be an orphan.”

  Connie reached over to take his hand. “You have me and the boys. Aren’t we enough?”

  Charley gave her a small smile. “I guess you’ll do.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Woodruff’s room was always filled with flowers. Mrs. McNally had organized the Garden Club, which both ladies belonged to, and arrangements were brought in and then whisked away as soon as they showed signs of wilting. Connie’s brothers and sisters and their families all came to visit, along with aunts and uncles and that group of older women Mrs. Woodruff sat with at family events. Charley and Connie were often there, holding her frail, bony hand, ringing for the nurse when she started coughing or needed more medicine for the pain. She was sick for days after each chemotherapy treatment. Her hair fell out and then came back in, little white hairs standing in stiff rows like corn stalks left late in the field.