CADILLAC,
OKLAHOMA
CADILLAC,
OKLAHOMA
Louise Farmer Smith
©2016, Louise Farmer Smith
ISBN: 978-0-9964395-2-7
UPPER HAND PRESS
P. O. Box 91179
Bexley, Ohio 43209
U. S. A.
Designed by Natalee Michelle Brown
Printed at Bookmasters, Ashland, Ohio
For Tim and Virginia
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Voice of Experience Sloane ISAAC Willard 1948
The Estate Sloane ISAAC Willard 2012
Community Enhancement 2013
The Courier Reporter 2013
The American Mind 2011
The Soloist 2011
Power Breakfast 2013
A Comforting Voice 2013
Faithful Elders 2013
Don’t Turn Around 2013
Jamie-Gwen 2012
Sugar House 2010
Sloane on Trial 2013
Cousins
First Move
As True As Anything
Cadillac Sheriff
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sugar House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer, 1997
The Soloist, Antietam Review, Fiction Prize, 1997
The Estate, Weber Studies, Summer, 1998
Deep and Comforting Voice, Writers Forum, Winter, 1999
Faithful Elders, Potomac Review, Fiction Prize, Fall, 2000
Don’t Turn Around, anthologized in Dots on a Map, Mint Hill Press, 2008
The American Mind, Potomac Review, Spring, 2010
Voice of Experience, CrossTimbers, 2012, Pushcart nominee
The use of the surname, Willard, is a tribute
to Sherwood Anderson.
VOICE OF EXPERIENCE
SLOANE ISAAC WILLARD
1948
Sally arrived in our town the summer I turned seventeen, and that three-month stretch of heat burned up what was left of my childhood. She had that kind of wrecked voice that made her sound like a pack-a-day smoker, a woman with a story to tell in what my granddad Sloane Benjamin Willard, who’d been to France in WWI, called a whiskey voice. She looked to me like she might be as old as twenty-five, the perfect older woman to train me for what I hoped would be a lifetime of pleasing women.
Earlier, in the spring, I’d made a very bad start on this with Mary Evelyn Huffman after the Junior prom, when I kissed her on the nose and not in a cute way. The look of disgust on Mary Evelyn’s face said she could tell what a clumsy idiot I was. That had been the close of an almost interminable year, 1948, which yielded only one thing of any value. In American Lit class I read a quote from Benjamin Franklin about older women being grateful for the attentions of younger men. This, of course, was not a passage assigned by the teacher, but the fruit of my habitual prowling outside the designated pages looking for richer material.
Sally lived with relatives by the name of Lancaster, a kind but childless couple, whose only distinction in town was raising peacocks on a heavily treed acreage a mile or two west. I was surprised when Mother told me Sally had taken a job as the Methodist church secretary, and I let myself imagine that this job—keeping attendance records, paying utility bills, and writing notes to shut-ins—was a cover, a kind of recompense for the former, racy life her husky voice suggested. Sometimes I’d feel ashamed of this fantasy when I’d see her in town, modestly dressed and minding her own business. But she was one of the few good-looking single women in Cadillac, and I finally convinced myself that seeing as how I was from a good Baptist family, it would be a step in the right direction for her to get to know me.
I devised a plan. My summer job was making the deliveries for McCall’s Grocery. I had fixed a large sturdy box to the front of my bicycle and pedaled around town in 90 plus degree heat trying to reach the housewives before the milk and eggs got warm. So it was easy for me to pedal over to the church office and pretend I had a delivery for the pastor.
Standing in the doorway, grinning, my tall gangly shadow making the little room even darker, I held up the bag of onions a housewife had changed her mind about. “I’m Sloane Isaac Willard with your grocery delivery, ma’am.” The office wasn’t much more than a closet and smelled of dust. It was hot as hell. There was a high window in the back, but it looked like it was painted shut. Stacks of hymnals were stored on the floor. In the dim light Sally was typing at a table just big enough to hold the huge typewriter.
“I’m sorry. What did you say?” She looked at me politely, like maybe I wanted to join the church.
“You could use a fan in here.”
“Did you need something?”
“Whatcha typing?”
“Reverend Morgan’s sermon. Can I help you?”
Just hearing that tragic voice made me sure I’d chosen the right woman, but the fact that she was encircled by hymnals and typing a sermon set me back and I left.
It took a week to come up with a new plan. I spent all the tips I’d earned since the first of June to purchase a small black electric fan at the second-hand store. I hid it in the stock room at McCall’s until I had a delivery in the direction of the church.
That night I overheard my aunt tell my mother that Sally had been married very briefly to what she described as a “clean-cut young man from a good family.” The two women went on to speculate about what went wrong, and I pretended to shine my shoes.
“Perhaps he didn’t want children,” Mother offered.
“We-ell,” said my aunt, always one to darken any discussion, “perhaps it was her who didn’t want children.”
“Nooo,” Mother said. “Not that sweet thing. There she is working for Reverend Morgan. He wouldn’t hire a woman who didn’t want children.”
“Three months they were married,” my aunt said, her eyebrows up. “A woman always believes that she can bring a man around to children over the years. Right? But a man would act swiftly if his bride said, absolutely no children. No man would stick by a woman like that even though she is a pretty little thing.”
My whole body was heating up at the idea of Sally having been married, and my mind pressed her against the wall of the church office. “I’ll just finish these on the back porch,” I told the women as I clutched my shoes in front of my zipper.
When I took the fan to Sally, I insisted that she let me plug it in. With the seriousness of a man installing an electric washing machine, I instructed her to sit at her desk while I sat on the floor and adjusted the direction of the airflow until it fluttered her skirt. Still sitting on the floor, I schooled her on the importance of using the oscillating option. “You want the fan to blow away from you for a second or two, so you can start to sweat again. That makes it cooler when the fan hits you.” She nodded politely and thanked me, her husky voice making me sweat even more. I gazed at the bare pink toes in her sandals until she said, “Now that I have all this cool air, I know my work will go faster. Thank you again. That was very sweet.”
This was as close as I’d been and if I left now, I had no idea what I’d do next to get inside this room. I backed two steps to the door. “Do you have a car?” I blurted.
She put her head to the side like she was on to me.
“Never mind,” I said, “I just wondered how you got to work and back out to the Lancasters.”
“Sometimes I have a ride. Sometimes I walk. It’s not very far.”
“Seems far to me. A mile or two.”
She shrugged and turned to her work.
The sting of this rejection sent me into a week of despair mixed with moments of wild elation. The image of the married woman pressed the accelerator on my heart, and I prayed for inspiration. Meanwhile, I
decided to attend the Methodist services. The next Sunday, I sat directly behind her. That was a mistake. I could smell her flowery fragrance and was soon in no condition to be in the company of God and the Methodists.
Nights were torture. My mind would fly into extravagant fantasies of running away with her, me improbably at the wheel of the Lancaster’s Dodge, and then everything would crash in sweaty, unsatisfying attempts to satisfy myself. I slept little and my parents eyed me with suspicion and concern.
From behind the parsonage’s forsythia hedge, I spied on Sally and discovered that she left the church every day at 3:00 on the dot. My deliveries were usually over by 2:00 and the obvious solution finally dawned on me. Route 201, the road to the Lancaster’s, opened before me, the path to Paradise.
Clean and pressed, I showed up at 3:00 Friday afternoon to walk her home. She was putting a stiff, black cover on her typewriter. “You’re in high school, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question. “You’re the druggist’s boy.”
I nodded. “Sloane Isaac Willard, ma’am,” and added that I was a senior and liked walking and talking. I let on that I was well-read in current events and literature and had a lot to talk about. She shrugged. And we began our first walk together.
I talked about the Marshall Plan. I talked about President Truman and a whole lot of other stuff I’ve forgotten now. A nervous kid talking big and not stopping to take a breath, I didn’t inquire about her, where she came from, or what she liked. When the Lancaster’s farm suddenly loomed before me, I realized I’d wasted my first opportunity to learn anything from this woman or make myself desirable to her. She thanked me for seeing her home, an old-fashioned phrase even then, and the gulf between our ages widened.
There’s always a price to pay for trying something new in a small town, and sure enough, a friend of my aunt had seen us as she’d driven past. The sound of the car had probably been drowned out by the raving idiot who hadn’t noticed.
“Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?” my aunt asked in a voice overflowing with insinuation. “Why don’tcha tell that girl she needs to clear her throat.”
“Margaret!” said my mother, always one to protect me. “Did you know that McCall’s put their mayonnaise on sale?”
“No one else in this town has much to say,” Sally said after we’d started walking regularly, and I’d calmed down. “To me, I mean,” she added.
I thought about this, then asked, “Haven’t you made any friends here?”
“I get the idea that a divorced woman is a little suspect.”
In one fell swoop Sally had opened up a real conversation. I felt I was in way over my head and just listened to our footsteps on the gravelly shoulder of the road. Finally I asked, “What’s it like, getting divorced?”
She turned her head away. “Divorce is just a legal term. It doesn’t mean you stop loving someone.”
This was unexpected. I wanted a story about a rotten guy who hit her, and she was too proud to stay with such a man and got a lawyer. “So why’d you get divorced? Didn’t he want children?”
“We both wanted children very much.” The farm was in sight and she thanked me and took off, walking fast. I watched her head for that house where two dull, old people waited, people who hadn’t, as my mother had reported, introduced her to potential friends at their church. But I didn’t want her to have friends. I needed her to be so desperately lonely that she’d value the company of a high school boy.
By the end of July the heat stayed through the night, the leaves on the trees drooped, and the grass turned straw color as usual. Sometimes Mr. Lancaster was waiting out in front of the church in his Dodge, so I didn’t get to walk Sally home. But when I did, she smiled like she was glad to see me. My aunt kept teasing me about the divorcée, but that got easier to ignore. I also gained a little more control of the conversation with Sally.
“What was it like being married?” I asked near the end of August.
“He’s a wonderful man.” Her voice caressed the words, and I despaired. At least she hadn’t given his name. I didn’t really want to know anything about him. I just wanted to know her. “So why did you get divorced?”
She didn’t say anything for most of a mile, and my heart ached a little for her because I knew some big thing had happened to her, and she’d had to leave her hometown and had no one to talk to. No way to work it out of her system.
She gave me a sad look. “You’re so young.”
“Oh Sally, don’t say that. Just talk to me. You know you’ll feel better if you talk to me.”
She thought about this for another quarter mile, then without any prompting from me said, “I didn’t want to leave him, and his parents said if I stayed with him, they’d put me through school at the university. Pay for everything.” She glanced at me to see how I was taking this.
“You loved him. You wanted to stay. You could have had a college education. So?” I could have mentioned I’d heard he was clean-cut and from a good family, too, but she was praising him enough, and besides it would hurt her to know she was talked about.
“Let’s rest a minute,” she said. There was a big cottonwood tree surrounded by bushes on the right side of the road, and we sat down in some dead grass beneath the tree. We were close enough to the farm that I could hear one of the peacocks screaming, like the squall of a wildcat.
Sally sat down, pulled her dress down tight over her bent knees and crossed her arms around them. Looking off toward town, she rested her chin on her arms. “I left Stillwater because I couldn’t bear to run into Stephen. Just seeing him burned a hole in me. I couldn’t live with him in the same house and not really have him as my husband. Don’t you see?”
“Didn’t he love you?”
“He will always love me.”
I didn’t want to hear any more about these people. Wasn’t love what made it all work? What had happened to her? She was so small and in so much pain. I put my arm around her and leaned my head against hers. “I’d do anything for you,” I said.
She turned and put her hands on my chest and pressed me to the ground and let her slender body down on me. I got my arms around her. I knew what to do. She didn’t have to tell me. One hand behind her head and the other across her back so as not to hurt her, I rolled us over. She had two hands full of my shirt. She was trembling. “I begged him!” she cried. She had wanted Stephen and he hadn’t wanted her, and her body bucked with the grief of this. “Please,” she sobbed and I slid my hand up between her legs but she pushed me away and sat up, leaned her head on her knees and sobbed. Though I was burning, I sat up and rested my hand on her back. Panting, I waited.
Finally Sally turned to me. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s just I always thought Stephen would be the first.”
What could I say? I’d been so close. Life would never bring me another woman like Sally. I swallowed hard. “It’s okay,” I muttered and softly patted her back. “It’s okay. But I can’t imagine a man not wanting you, so maybe he was queer? Was that it?”
“Don’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t.” I flushed under this sign of her trust.
“I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.” She began to cry again.
“Oh, Sally, nothing, nothing in the world is wrong with you. You just need a different man. One who’ll love you completely.”
“You think I’ll find one?”
“Sure you will.”
She sniffed and with a sad little smile she said, “So will Stephen.” Then she began to really cry.
“I guess so.” Now I wanted to cry ’cause I’d lost my chance, but also because I knew I sure hadn’t been offering real love.
“You’ll find a girl,” she said. “And she’ll be so lucky to have a boy who is driven to pursue and win her.”
That day I took her words as a promise that I would find a girl to love, and through the years I’ve always been grateful that whatever she thought of her clumsy, relentless suitor, she never laughed at
him. Now, nearly seventy years on, my youth seems like a foreign country, a place where a deranged young man could carry on his secret mission in a town that neither enriched nor stunted its children.
Some of the details of Sally’s unique prettiness have faded, but not the memory of us sitting there under the cottonwood, two virgins picking grass out of each other’s hair, me and the woman who taught me about love.
§
THE ESTATE
SLOANE ISAAC WILLARD
2012
My name is Phoebe and I was eleven the winter of 2012, so I got to sit with the grownups in the pew next to my Great Uncle, Sloane Willard. It was an easy funeral. Nobody had to come too far or cry too hard, though I did feel Uncle Sloane sighing and swallowing during the service. It was his half-brother Wendell who had died.
But afterwards at his big place, he sliced the ham with the stately calm we expected from him. He was my favorite relative, a person I could count on when something funny happened at the dinner table—like Marvella claiming Grover Richmond had proposed to her, something an eleven-year-old like me wasn’t supposed to understand anyway. I’d look over at Sloane and see him drop his jaw without opening his mouth and give me a sideways, big-eyed look.
He was old now and given to staring spells, and on top of that he was probably the most grieved of us all by his younger brother’s dying. Wendell had taken up farming after retiring from the railroad. “Wendell’s talent is for telegraphy,” Sloane used to say when people laughed about Wendell’s farm. His cows, Patsy and Opal, went dry because Uncle Wendell was too shy to take them to the neighbor’s bull. He kept the dry cows on as pets. And he kept everything else he’d inherited with the farm—the rusting plows and harrows, the dead tractors and combines, the many hoops of wire and bales of fencing—scattered about the place just as he’d found them. Wendell was kind of the opposite of Uncle Sloane, who was a lawyer.
Cadillac, Oklahoma Page 1
