Rodin's Debutante

by Ward Just

  New Jesper was a fine place to grow up in, its streets lined with chestnut trees and elms and oaks. In the summertime you could ride your bike all over town and not see the full sun, only its shafts of light through branches thick with leaves, chestnuts scattered everywhere. At one time the downtown had an oak at each pedestrian intersection, but the merchants complained that they interfered with foot traffic so the city council ordered their removal. A women's group organized a protest, but the protest went nowhere and one by one the heavy trees were removed, leaving the downtown bare as a settlement in Arizona or Utah. Still, the public school system was excellent, staffed mostly by middle-aged women of frosty temperament and high expectations, though few of its high school graduates went on to college. College was not the normal aspiration for the sons and daughters of blue-collar mill workers for whom English was very much a second language. The sons followed their fathers into the mills, and the daughters their mothers into marriage, usually after a stint as a clerk in one of the two downtown department stores. This was before and during the war, in retrospect a dynamic parenthesis in the progress of things in the small towns of the Midwest. The war was much distant, present in newspaper headlines and the conversations of adults at the dinner table, unless a father or a son was away fighting in it, and that was not the case in my family. The terrible details of the struggle were known only to the combatants. Reversals were concealed by the authorities and meanwhile the place names flew by. Saipan. Ploieşti. My friends and I graduated from Cowboys and Indians to a game we called War, heroic leathernecks battling the sly Japanese, surely the main enemy. There were many German-speaking families in our town and no one wished to make their lives more uncomfortable than they already were. I suppose that was the reason, looking back on it. Bloodthirsty Tojo was the greater threat to domestic tranquillity. At any event, in those years New Jesper prospered, the factories running two and three shifts a day. Work was available to anyone who wanted it and wages were high. Everything changed after the war.

  MOST DAYS AFTER SCHOOL my friend Dougie Henderson and I would scurry down below the hill looking for adventure that could not be found among the mowed lawns and shaded porches of the neighborhood. We carried air rifles for rabbits and the occasional raccoon. A ten-minute walk on the path through the underbrush at the base of the bluff took us to the railroad tracks. The path wound through a marsh, standing water that in summer was fetid, the water black and clammy as ink, boiling with mosquitoes. The underbrush was so tangled you could not see through it. The lay of the land down below the hill was a different country, untamed and unsupervised, and it was ours, Dougie's and mine. Also, it was inhabited. Along the way we found empty whiskey bottles and crushed cigarette packs, evidence of adult life. We had a hilarious time imitating drunkards, weaving and stumbling incoherently. As we approached the tracks we threw away the bottles and moved with care, Indian fashion. In a thicket off the path was a concrete root cellar, origin unknown; there were no houses anywhere in sight. But we were always careful to look inside, pushing away the brambles that hid the entrance. The root cellar was usually undisturbed and that made it more mysterious still. We listened carefully for the freight train that lumbered by at slow speed, fifteen or twenty miles an hour. The trains came up without warning. The air seemed to stiffen and suddenly the engine surged by pulling a load of fifty freight cars with the red caboose bringing up the rear. Every few weeks a train came by bearing battle tanks on flatcars, causing us to wonder what need they had for tanks in Milwaukee. Soldiers lounged on the flatcars and when they saw us they would give a casual military salute, the sort of salute a professional soldier would give to a civilian. We tried to get to the tracks before four o'clock in the afternoon, in time to watch the passenger express from Chicago, bright yellow coaches and the steam engine in front. The express hurtled by at such speed that we could not see the passengers but always waved at them, imagining the day when we would be aboard, bound for Milwaukee or the Twin Cities on business, nonchalantly reading a newspaper and enjoying a cocktail and a cigarette. The train was there and gone in seconds.

  There were tramps down below the hill, men riding the rails to get to somewhere else. Dougie and I were told never to approach them for any reason whatsoever, but when we saw a tramp, which was seldom, he looked harmless enough, always unshaven and badly clothed but not threatening in any way. They were not interested in children and seemed to inhabit a world of their own, always moving on. There was a kind of romance to it, men without women or families, waiting for something to turn up. The tramps we saw were old, at least as old as our parents and some much older. They had evidently led hard lives, though neither Dougie nor I could have said what a hard life constituted, beyond shabby clothing and an untrimmed beard and eyes that did not seem fully focused. Dougie said they looked uncoordinated, borrowing the expression from our gym teacher.

  Once a month or so a tramp showed up at our back door and asked for food. My mother would give him fruit, apples or bananas, and when I delivered it to him he would invariably nod and thank me and walk slowly away, down below the hill in the direction of the railroad tracks, retracing his steps. Asking for food, he always held his cloth cap in his hand. These men were very much a part of our lives and at the same time invisible. We never saw the same tramp twice and yet we did not differentiate among them. Their threadbare clothes were a kind of uniform. Where had they come from? Where were they going? My father said you found tramps anywhere there was a railroad. He called them hard-luck cases. Broken homes, he explained, along with "early defeats" leading to a loss of purpose in life, aimlessness and dependence on whiskey, but all the same, subject to the identical laws and penalties as anyone else. In that way, my father said, justice was blind.

  Along the railroad tracks were the remains of fires and always an empty bottle of whiskey nearby, along with cigarette stubs and apple cores and discarded bits of clothing. Looking at their camps, Dougie and I couldn't piece together the lives of these men, not that we tried very hard. They were beyond our understanding and certainly beyond our help, and they seemed very far away from the poise—I suppose the better word is coordination—of our own fathers, part of another world altogether, a respectable, successful world. The tramps were the inhabitants of the uncivilized country down below the hill, a small, mean world with the promise and variety of a set of railroad tracks—except, of course, to Dougie and me, who saw it as a form of liberty, re-lease from the coat-and-tie milieu of our fathers.

  When we reached the tracks we always paused for a cigarette, Old Golds for Dougie, Chesterfields for me, filched from cigarette packs at home. Something lawless about it, casually smoking a cigarette as freight trains lumbered by, and then snapping the butt at the rails and watching the shower of sparks. Often we would climb atop a switching box in order to see the lake a half mile distant, a sliver of blue beyond the bulk of the auto parts factory. Our terrain was so rough it was difficult reconciling it with the flash of color on the horizon. In summer we saw the sails of small boats and that was more incongruous still, the graceful lines of the vessels in sharp contrast to the underbrush and stunted trees around us, the clouds of mosquitoes and the dead campfires of the tramps. In the damp prairie cold of January and February ice built up along the lake, white replacing blue. The harbor was frozen all the way to the breakwater and sometimes beyond. The lakefront was out of reach because the auto parts factory stood in the way, the factory bounded by a chain-link fence with razor wire along the top. The rumor in town—vigorously denounced by my father—was that secret work was proceeding inside, something important to do with the war effort, and that New Jesper should be proud to be summoned to play a role. Once, standing at the fence and looking inside to see the secret work for ourselves, Dougie and I were shooed away by an indignant watchman. Goddamned kids, he shouted at us, but we thumbed our noses at him. The fence that kept us out also kept him in, though it took Dougie to notice that he was wearing a revolver in a holster and was carrying a two
-foot-long billy club in his fist. We assumed that the fence was there to protect the factory and its secret work from the tramps and that set us to laughing because the tramps were so uncoordinated, as Dougie said. None of them had the cunning or initiative of Japanese spies. They were down and out.

  I suppose Dougie and I were eight or nine years old when we saw our first tramp. He was asleep with his head resting on a discarded rail tie. He looked deflated, collapsed like a rag doll. I thought he was dead but said nothing about that to Dougie. We were twenty feet from him, staring at him as if he were an animal in a zoo. The tramp looked up, startled, and seeing we were boys and not rail agents, let out a high-pitched whoop and then smiled broadly.

  You boys have a smoke for an old man?

  Dougie and I looked at each other.

  Give us a smoke, the tramp said.

  I threw him a Chesterfield, underhanding it so that it bounced at his feet.

  Match, he said sharply, so sharp it was almost a snarl.

  I threw him a book of matches. He caught it, lit the cigarette, and sat Indian fashion, his arms on his knees. He put the matches in his shirt pocket.

  Now where are you boys from? I'll bet you're from up there on the hill.

  That's right, Dougie said.

  Live in a fancy house, I'll bet.

  We've got to be going, I said.

  Stay awhile. Have a smoke.

  We have to go home, Dougie said.

  You just got here.

  We said we would be home.

  Up there on the hill, he said.

  Dougie shrugged. Everyone lived on the hill.

  Sit awhile, the tramp said. We can visit. What's your name?

  Dougie and I took a step backward.

  I got boys your age, the tramp said. But I don't know where they are. I don't know where they live. The tramp exhaled a great cloud of tobacco smoke and watched it disperse in the breeze. Last time I heard they was down south somewheres. But I can't remember the name of the town. I prefer riding the rails and one of these days I'll get back down south. I only need some money. I need some dollars.

  Dougie and I nodded.

  My name is Minning. Earl Minning. You boys got any dollars on you? I'll bet you do, coming from up there on the hill. The tramp smiled unpleasantly and when he began to struggle to his feet Dougie and I took another step backward and ran away like rabbits. He yelled after us, Come back, come back, you little bastards. But we ran and ran through the underbrush. I could hear Earl Minning behind us, his footfalls and heavy breathing, and when I stumbled and fell I expected his rough hand on my head, but when I turned he was not there. I sensed him nearby but I could not see him. Dougie was up ahead yelling at me to get up and run but I was frozen stiff, my knee bloody from the fall. A sour odor was in my nostrils and I knew it was Earl Minning and I had no money to give him. At last I was on my feet, and my fear vanished. I joined Dougie and we trotted up the hill until we reached my house. My mother was in her garden and when she saw us tumble out of the underbrush she asked us what was the matter, and we replied that we were footracing and nothing was the matter. I did not want her to know that we had come upon anyone down below the hill, certainly not a tramp. We regarded the place as private, our own domain, exclusive. We were not intruders; Earl Minning was the intruder. But I also knew for a certainty that he did not wish us well. From the expression on his face he did not wish anyone well. And all these years later I continue to wonder what brought him to that place, his children down south somewhere, he himself riding the rails.

  LOOKING BACK on my childhood I am surprised that our parents allowed Dougie and me to roam unsupervised down below the hill. My father spent his childhood in the house we lived in and I do know that he had fond memories of the wild terrain and unexpected encounters with animals. My air rifle was a hand-me-down from him. It was my proudest possession, though I did not have it with me that day we met Earl Minning, and I am certain it would have made no difference if I had. My father wanted to believe that New Jesper had not changed since his own untroubled youth. And it was true that the iceman arrived with blocks of ice on his horse-drawn wagon and some of the streets on the north side of town were still gaslit. Every Friday morning the cutler arrived to sharpen our knives. The Victorian courthouse was unchanged. My father occupied the same chambers as his father when he was a probate court judge, and many of the same photographs hung on the walls and my grandfather's law books crowded the oak shelves on the dark side of the room. A six-foot-high grandfather clock occupied one corner and a hat rack of deer antlers another. He wrote his serious opinions in longhand at a standup desk, his routine ones spoken into a Dictaphone and transcribed by his clerk.

  My father was forty years old when he married my mother. She was barely twenty, a downstate girl in New Jesper visiting her aunt. The aunt gave a dinner party, invited my father, and he and my mother were married one month later and I followed nine months after that. My mother was called Melody, most apt because she was always humming a tune. My father was a profoundly conservative man, sober perhaps to a fault. He avoided excitement and believed that unpleasantness should be kept out of sight, especially from women and children. In a sense his greatest wish was that tomorrow be much like today, or, better still, yesterday. Like many conservatives he was a pessimist. His business, supervising wills and trusts, did not discourage him in this view. He had watched people try to control their money from the grave, their hands reaching up to grandchildren and beyond. There were only four or five truly rich people in New Jesper and they all wanted a say after they'd gone. They made the money, they had the right to determine its distribution, hence wills that were bewildering in their complexity and too often a contradiction of human nature. Now and again my father would receive a will from one of the North Shore rich and be astounded at its size and labyrinthine byways and spiteful codicils. Their Chicago lawyers learned soon enough that they required local counsel to navigate the heavy weather in the chambers of Judge Erwin Goodell. My mother was always amused at my father's droll accounts of proceedings in his courtroom. When I came to know him as a man as well as a father he was already deep in middle age. He believed in home rule, the town, the neighborhood, the second-floor bedroom. I am bound to say that this cast of mind led to innocence as to the dangers of the world. His courtroom was not the world.

  I am sure that in some sentimental region of his mind my father believed it would be wrong to declare the area down below the hill as off-limits to his son. It would be the same as declaring boyhood itself off-limits, an admission that New Jesper had become unmanageable and somehow sinister, barbarians in charge. New Jesper would be no different from Chicago, gang-ridden, absent of civic virtue, altogether corrupt. Certainly no place to raise a family in comfort and safety. Certainly no place to grow old among neighbors you had known your entire life. New Jesper would not go to the dogs on my father's watch and therefore his son and his son's friend could roam down below the hill as much as they liked. Be watchful, Lee, my father said. Take care. There were tramps in his day too, though perhaps not so many. My father customarily delivered his lectures in the early evening, often while listening to Sidney Bechet on the phonograph in his study. He was a devotee of blues music. Colored music, he called it. Soulful music. The genuine article.

  THINGS CHANGED FOR GOOD after two incidents that occurred within one month of each other. The year was 1946. They were unrelated incidents but always spoken of together as if they were somehow linked, and a forecast of disorder. My father called it breakdown. A tramp was found dead near the railroad tracks not a quarter mile from our house. The tramp was badly beaten and, it seemed, tortured. The police had no leads, and the chief was quoted in the newspaper as saying it was the worst crime he had ever seen or heard of and he had spent a harrowing year in Europe with the airborne and was no stranger to atrocity. I read the paper avidly but understood that some details of the killing were being withheld. Indeed there was no mention of torture, a word my father had
used in private conversation with my mother. The report of the killing in the New Jesper World was nothing like the reports of crime in the Chicago papers, one lurid particular after another. The Chicago papers did not cover the tramp killing because he was, after all, only a tramp and not a socialite or gangster. His name was unknown. No one knew where he came from. His destination was unknown. All that was certified was that he was male, Caucasian, brown-eyed, middle-aged. Our police chief admitted there were no suspects while at the same time vowing to clear New Jesper of tramps. Tramps were no longer welcome in the city, he said, as if it were all but certain that the killer himself was a tramp and that tramps generally constituted a threat to the good order of the community. The first duty of civil authority was to keep the town safe from lawless elements.