Seeing America

by Nancy Crocker

  Published 2014 by Medallion Press, Inc.

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  is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment from this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 2014 by Nancy Crocker

  Cover design by Arturo Delgado

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPUB ISBN# 9781605425740

  For Charlie3

  CHAPTER ONE

  “How about you just stop treating me like a titty baby?”

  I thought of that one after I was already out the back door. I’m a regular genius at what I should have said.

  But to hell with it. Nothing I’d said in eighteen years mattered to Dad. I couldn’t swallow water to suit the man. Saturday morning, and he’d started in about a hammer he found out back by the shed. When did I use it? Why didn’t I put it back? Would it kill me to ask to borrow his tools in the first place?

  Like one of his hammers spending a night outside the toolbox was going to knock the earth off-balance and throw the world into darkness. I walked down the driveway, kicking rocks that belonged to him. Using up air that was his, no doubt.

  “Why, hello, John!” Mary Albrecht’s voice whipped my head up so fast my neck just about snapped. She was walking by with her folks. “Are you coming uptown for the spectacle?”

  I said, “Why, yes, I am,” and nodded. “Mornin’, ma’am. Sir.”

  Something fun came to Wakenda about as often as the thirteen-year locusts. Was I going? Not yes but hell, yes. I fell in behind the three of them. Then they turned up the front walk of a house down the street before I could think of any more to say to Mary. Figured.

  But the day promised to be a prize on its own. It was one of those beauties in March that can trick you into thinking spring has picked Missouri as her favorite place over all others. Houses were emptying out all along the street, and every person who stepped outside tilted his face toward the sunshine like he was receiving a blessing.

  The town’s two churches would be hard-pressed the day before Judgment to scare up a crowd as big as was gathering that noon. When the old Number 3 engine split the air with a mournful wail and all the hounds in town took up a chorus behind it, it was a little like a church bell and choir: Come, all ye gawkers! Banty Wilson’s about to make a jackass of himself! Made me grin.

  Banty had bought the town’s first automobile a few months back and since then claimed the Maxwell could do just about everything but give birth and churn butter. Finally, he bragged it was faster than a MoPac steam engine.

  But that had turned out to be one more brag than Curly Weis could stand. So Curly talked his boss into taking Number 3 out of service that Saturday morning for the solitary purpose of shutting the blowhard’s mouth. My guess was, the big shots at the railroad were fed up hearing about automobiles putting trains out of business someday. Nobody with a lick of sense thought Banty had a chance at winning the race, but it wasn’t going to bother anybody to watch his ass handed to him either.

  By the time I got to Main Street, I was walking through a cloud of steam. Faces appeared like specters and then got swallowed up again in the mist.

  Then one figure appeared out of the fog, looking still as a statue at the sidewalk railing. When I got closer, I saw it was Paul Bricken. Of course. Too many people trying to get somewhere they weren’t, stepping on feet and poking elbows in their neighbors’ ribs, but around Paul there might have been a shield keeping everybody a foot away. Like blindness might be catching.

  In the year Paul had been home after finishing high school in St. Louis, I’d watched how folks ignored him almost like they were the ones who couldn’t see. I did have the advantage of being used to him. But you’d think somebody else could at least make an effort once in a while.

  I went up and bumped his elbow, and the face that turned could have been carved out of wood. “Hey, Paul,” I said. “John Hartmann. How you doin’ today?”

  His shoulders relaxed some. “Fine, John, thanks. You?”

  “Aw, been better. Been better.” I bent toward his ear. “Let’s just say when Thanksgiving rolls around, I’ll be thankful I’ve got only two parents.”

  He laughed louder than the joke was worth, and heads turned like somebody had rattled off a fart in church. I bet most of them had never heard Paul laugh.

  Then he said, “Can I ask you a small favor?”

  “Sure. Name it.”

  “Would you stand here and tell me what goes on?”

  I was hoping to park myself next to Mary Albrecht, but Paul’s face had gone all the way red just for asking, and I couldn’t ignore that if I’d wanted to. I heard myself say, “Sure, I will. Just let me finish my rounds, and I’ll come back before the race starts.”

  That seemed to lift his chin a fraction higher.

  I came across Katie McCombs running through a forest of legs as I walked on, and I scooped her up and threw her in the air a few times to hear her squeal. My little sister had just about outgrown that. But then Ellen McCombs came steaming my way like a battleship and set in squawking like women do—putting on they’re upset when really they just want everybody in the county to hear what devoted mothers they are—so I set Katie down and went on.

  I wandered through the whole crowd without finding Mary, and my enthusiasm was severely tempered by the time I went back and started explaining to Paul how little he was missing. “Banty’s pullin’ the Maxwell up next to the tracks and makin’ a show out of linin’ up exactly even with the cowcatcher on Number 3. Curly’s got about a week’s worth of steam goin’, but you can probably tell that.”

  I didn’t much care anymore, but Paul’s face looked like Christmas morning. So I filled in some. “Ruby Watts is tryin’ so hard to get Billy Sweeney’s attention she’s just about to stand on her head. Yep, there she goes . . . Dang it! She remembered to put on drawers this morning . . . Whoa! Roy Auptman’s gut is gettin’ so big it’s gonna need its own address before long.”

  Paul paid me in chuckles.

  And then “There they go” was the end of it for us. Terms of the race were ten miles side by side—Wakenda to Miami Station—so we saw the start, a few others would see the finish, and in between was nothing but hot air.

  That was pretty much the story of Wakenda, if you asked me. High hopes when something—anything—was about to happen, then a letdown when the same old people showed up and nothing much went on.

  The town was a lot like the Missouri River four miles south. It might be different water running past the bank every day, every month, every year, but it all looked the same. High school sweethearts got married after graduation and started producing the next generation of high school sweethearts. Boys, for the most part, followed their fathers into the fields or onto the river. At any gathering, you could see the past, present, and future in one sweep.

  But no matter how little happened, there was always plenty for the men to hash out over beers later on. Thank God. Even if the talk at Charlie’s didn’t rise above the topics of crops and the weather, it beat going home. I asked Paul if he wanted to come along, but before he could answer, his d
ad showed up.

  “Have you had enough foolishness?”

  I winced, but Paul just said, “Yes, Father,” and then, “Thank you, John,” with his face a blank mask. I couldn’t imagine what was in his mind as they walked away.

  Mr. Bricken spent his days at the bank in Carrollton saying yea or nay on crop loans to all the farmers in the area, and even my dad jumped when Mr. Bricken said the word. But you’d think he could have a kind word for his son. His only kid.

  Enough foolishness? Even I had a longer leash than that.

  I went on to Charlie’s alone and was toward the end of my first beer when a couple of men came in scratching their heads. They’d gone to Miami Station that morning to watch Curly win the race and couldn’t explain what they’d seen instead. Banty Wilson—acting nervous, they decided—had driven up in the Maxwell while there was still no train in sight, and he’d said he better just keep on going because he had things to do at home. Everybody agreed that last part alone was cause for suspicion.

  These two men had waited another half an hour, then driven their teams back to Wakenda to see if anyone there had news. Nobody did.

  But pretty soon, Joe Clipner came in about to bust. He said he’d been coming home on Well’s Road alongside the railroad tracks and had come upon Curly climbing the fence at the back of his own farm, with Number 3 sitting dead on the tracks nearby.

  “And I got out and said, ‘Curly, what the hell you doin’?’” Joe told us. “And he said he was so disgusted he couldn’t even work up an anger yet. Said he was only a mile or so out of town when he pulled up even to Banty’s tin can and passed the little bastard. But about then, he saw somethin’ up ahead on the tracks, and before he could even reach for his field glasses, he knew. That little shit had taken one of Curly’s own heifers, just about ripe, and staked her out so she was astraddle the tracks. Curly said he about busted an aorta before he got Number 3 stopped no more than ten feet from that poor little Hereford. He got her back in the pasture and had just come from cleanin’ up in the house when I caught up to him.”

  Joe sat back then and took a long pull on his beer like he’d accomplished a great feat. When gossip is the local pastime, knowing something before everybody else does can start to feel a lot like success.

  The crowd at Charlie’s was too thick for me to know who was talking half the time, but some voices carried. Somebody yelled, “How did he think he’d get away with it? Banty’s an idiot, but he’s not stupid.” The rest of the men grumbled in agreement.

  Another man shouted, “Oh, he didn’t think he’d get away with it. He’s such a prideful lowlife he’d rather be known as a jackass cheat than be ragged about losing the bet!”

  From the way they acted, you’d have thought Banty had cheated these men instead of Curly and the railroad. But I guess in a way he had. They’d been looking forward to watching a good man put a loudmouth in his place, and Banty had taken that away from them. They started getting worked up about it, and the place got loud. Women came as far as the door, got a load of the crowd inside, and decided maybe they didn’t need flour until the next day after all.

  After a few beers, James McCombs, the minister from First Presbyterian, stood up on his chair and began to call for a tar and feathering. At least that’s what we thought he was saying. By then, his vowels were a lot stronger than his hard-edged letters.

  Somebody pointed out that tar and feathers wouldn’t exactly constitute an eye for an eye, and Reverend McCombs raked the crowd with a scowl and informed us that down through the ages, “a whole raft of righteous smiting” had come to folks who hadn’t necessarily smote first.

  Everybody drank to that. Then the man of God halfway climbed and partly fell off his chair and wandered out the back door to take a leak.

  The laughing that came after that seemed to lighten the grudge in the room. The only yelling then was from men trying to be heard over Claude Hutchison’s snoring after he curled up by the stove in the corner. Finally, Charlie’s old coon dog, Belle, came up and made three circles before dumping herself into the curve of Claude’s body, and that quieted him down some. They slept there and snorted and twitched together while neighbors visited and drank like on any other Saturday. Nobody else around my age had come, so it was kind of like a picture show. I nodded hello a few times, but mainly I stood against the wall and watched.

  The grousing started up again after somebody came trotting in to report that the Maxwell was parked in Banty’s shed and not a single lamp was lit in his house. I hadn’t seen Henry Brotherton come in, but he was hard to miss now. “Yellow belly!” he hollered. “Banty-ass chicken! Lily-livered coward!” I knew Henry—he’d been a year behind me in school until he dropped out—and I could see the shit-eating grin he was holding back. I knew the only thing he cared about right then was getting everybody’s blood boiling. And it was working. Things started to get ugly.

  Then Charlie broke out the whiskey and shot glasses, which seemed like a bad idea on the brink of spectacular to me. I’d been all for Banty’s nose being rubbed in his own stupidity, but I didn’t want to see anybody get hurt. Even him. Maybe boring wasn’t the worst way the day could turn out, after all.

  I’d never seen a lynch mob, but I’d heard stories and had a fair imagination, and I could feel the mood starting to turn in the room. The balance was tipping over from righteous anger into something raw and mean. Men yelled. Henry yelled louder.

  I started to feel sick, watching and listening. Sick and stuck—like I didn’t want to stay but I wasn’t able to leave. Like I needed to say something but my voice wouldn’t work. It was clear that somebody needed to do something, and fast. If nobody put the brakes on, there were going to be things done that could never be undone.

  Nobody was even arguing anymore. They were all just yelling about what Banty had coming to him. And I couldn’t think of one word that might make them stop or even slow down. Most of them were twice my age and three times as ignorant. Even if I could find the words, it didn’t mean they would listen to me. My heart was hammering hard against my ribs.

  Then Henry Brotherton jumped up on the counter and held a lit match over his head. I couldn’t tell his words from anybody else’s at that point, but the sight of even such a small flame made my blood run cold. Chairs started scraping back as men stood up. This was it: the place was about to boil over.

  “Aw, hell. He has to live with hisself. Isn’t that punishment enough?” It was my father, filling the doorframe. Nobody had heard him coming, but that deep rumble of his drowned out everybody else. “Come on, John.” My own face looked back at me, twice as serious and broadened by time. “Time to come on home.” He turned and disappeared.

  And in the few seconds he was there, he’d done what I couldn’t. When talk started up again, the noise was cut by half and whatever steam had built up was gone. Vanished. Nobody was heading over to Banty’s house that night.

  I don’t know why that didn’t make me feel a lot better than it did.

  I was almost to the door when Henry Brotherton’s voice rang out above the others. “Hey, John. My sister Ellen wants to know when you’re gonna get married and have your own kids to torment.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, just to be decent.

  “Yeah. I told her first you’d have to find a girlfriend that wasn’t a sheep.”

  The room exploded, and my face got hot fast. I wanted nothing more than to go over and bust Henry one, but the smirk on his face told me that was exactly what he wanted me to do. I guess my dad had ruined his good time and he was looking for another.

  I’d always heard that once, as a kid, Henry shoved a firecracker up a cat’s ass and lit it. Just then I could believe it.

  I walked out, shaking my head. The door banged behind me. Down the street in the gaslight, I could see my father, already a block away.

  Spring flirted with us for nearly a month, giving up a glimpse of her petticoats now and then before she finally gave in and showed us her bloomers. The da
ys grew longer and warmer, and the temperature in my house rose right alongside the mercury in the thermometer.

  Dad had always ridden me hard, but now I couldn’t do the smallest thing right. If I left my muddy boots on the back step, I was an idiot for not knowing it was going to rain. If I brought them in, it was the wrong day for that. When he was sorting and doctoring cows, I was always running the wrong one through the chute. Never mind they were Black Angus with no markings of any kind. I should know them apart. On and on.

  And Mom—good old Mom, so beaten down and tired since Catherine had come along—she was right there to tell him about every wet towel left on the floor that he might otherwise have missed. Both of them circled around, barking at Catherine and me like cattle dogs rounding up a herd.

  I imagine it’s just as annoying for cattle.

  I think Dad’s real problem was that I was graduating high school and hadn’t announced I wanted to farm with him until one of us dropped dead. When I was little, he always talked like that was a given. “Old Man Hodgkins knows I’ve got my eye on that forty that joins mine down in the bottom,” he’d say. “We’ll talk to him when the time comes to stake you.” Or he talked about my buying cattle. “Pay attention to how they act in the sale ring. It’s a sign of what you’ll be in for at home.”

  But about the time my voice changed, I’d stopped answering him. Or nodding. By then, it didn’t seem like he was trying to teach me so much as to whittle me down to a smaller version of him. Signing on for life sounded like a life sentence.

  Why he’d even want a partner who couldn’t hammer a nail to suit him beats me. I guess he thought I’d really foul things up if he wasn’t there to oversee my every minute. But that’s pure speculation. What I knew for sure was, the sentences that started with someday never got finished anymore, but they always thickened the air between us.