Lenny and Elmo

Mr. Carberry had been a well-liked man.  He was small, but bore a resemblance to the president, Franklin Roosevelt, and he would make farmers gathered at the grain elevator or barbershop laugh at his imitation of FDR.

"Gentlemen," he would say, balancing his glasses on the tip of his nose, "I want to talk to you this evening about banking," coaxing laughter even out of the most soured and disillusioned. 

The Carberry's farm rested on the Iowa-Minnesota border and had fields that stretched on flatlands of those two states.  The landscape was flat as a slab of pressed iron.  All over, farms dotted it in islands, each island consisting of a house, a barn, a silo, and a windbreak of trees.  Traveling west on a road at sunset allowed a view of the sun till its last flare of red at the horizon, and then one could see the black silhouettes of trees and windmills and houses.  A winter sunset tinted the snow-covered plains lavender and filled one's soul with a strange calm. 

The Carberry farmhouse itself was an attractive piece of craftsmanship, with a porch of intricate scrollwork carefully painted in tones of blue and cream.  Gingerbreading trimmed the pitch of the roof, and the house, only now showing signs of cracking and neglect, had been the work of love from a young farmer to his bride, a promise in wood and window and shingle that he would make this life as elegant and civilized as he possibly could out in the middle of the flat prairie where the wind sometimes blew so savagely.  The farmhouse was in Iowa, but Elmo's father had purchased adjacent Minnesota land to plant soybeans and, alternate seasons, corn. 

In April, Mr. Carberry and his wife drove to a dinner at their parish, and when they climbed in the Packard to drive home, the storm arose, bruise black and fierce.  The couple didn't even know the funnel was on the ground until it swept their car off the highway and kicked it a-tumble across a dirt-furrowed field.  It was 1941.  Elmo, who was not with them that evening, was their only son and he inherited the house and fields.

"I decided I'm going to sell off the Minnesota acres; I'm going to need that money."

Lenny Hessen, a friend Elmo had met at the Ottie Town Pump, lay on the bed of the second floor room; his cigarette made a brittle crackle as he took a drag.

"Ain't much of a farmer, are you, Elmo."

"Farming?  I hate everything about it."

"You're lucky your daddy can't hear you."

Seven years before, when Elmo had been fifteen, he labored beside his father to harvest the corn that would slowly, after a hard season in the fields, be transformed into the additional savings to replace their old tractor.  The pride and the farm would someday all be Elmo's, but far, far in the future, or so he thought, then.

No one disbelieved Elmo's abandonment of the workings of the farm.  When his father and mother were killed, the planting season was upon him and help from sympathetic neighbors got the crop in that spring and harvested in the fall.  But the crop had been meager and brought little money and the intense labor, and the loneliness broke Elmo's spirit.  Folks encouraged him to find a wife, but he was hopeless around young women; he frightened them through his wordlessness and his stares.  Why he repelled the opposite sex was an unknown to Elmo, though.  It was to him as if he had been the victim of a curse.  And so Elmo developed a near predatory conception of the workings of courtship.  He would sit in his car that had Minnesota license plates, parked on the square in St. Albans, and watch and watch, mentally grading the long-legged inventory that strolled before him.

Lola and Charlene

A backwards glance would now not reveal the hill from where they started, and the two young women walked with a building confident rhythm of those who know they can make their journey short by not contemplating the road ahead, but by drinking in the immediate surroundings.  Lola was cold, so she thought of spring.  I request from you, world, just a few simple things.  I request violets, white and blue and confederate.  I'll pinch their stems and bring them to me, their impossible odor so small and modest.  Is there a wedding in the grass between the violets and the air as we stumble on as we did one early May with the heavy mathematics books and never enough breakfast?  And I think the world is round, just a trip from my door to wherever and back again among the violets that ring the walkways and the shadows near the cellar and the well.

One bend in the road would reveal the narrow corridor between pin oak that led to Jeromy Sunfish's cabin.  Jeromy's wife, (she wasn't Indian at all; she had been a dark-haired, dark-eyed Serbian) had died from pneumonia, and left Jeromy with two children: a boy, Charles, now 12,  and a girl, Lucinda, now 16.  They were silent people and bothered no one, and yet rumors persisted that Jeromy was a murderer, had indeed cut the throat of his "squaw" and buried her deep in the woods.  Lola was in awe of the rumor.  Lola and Charlene crunched the gravel past this opening in the woods without uttering a sound.  A crow cried darkly from a branch above them.

When her father had taken her fishing, it had been down this path to Jeromy's cabin.  In spring, the path was lush with delicate and rare woodland flowers.  The sun cast islands on the ground cover and it was so hushed you could hear your thoughts echo and then still with your breath as some chickadee called from up in the shadow and sparkle of the leaves.  Hap Hessen, Lola's father, took this path by agreement and barter with Jeromy.  Jeromy gave Hap passage, a crock of homemade whisky, and fishing rights in exchange for three dozen eggs a week, a share of tobacco, and a plump hen for Christmas.  Hap thought this a fair exchange for access to one of the best fishing spots on the Little Cedar, but Hap's wife thought it was foolishness, charity, or robbery depending upon her mood.

Fishing days (they could be any of sweet weather, when it would be more productive hiring one's self out for carpentry or construction or various heavy labors, as Hap did when his conscience was loaded or when his wife needled him) Hap and Lola (and sometimes Lenny as well) would walk by Jeromy's cabin quietly if Jeromy did not show himself, which he rarely did.  Hap would quietly lift the lid of the box he himself had constructed for the barter and gently lay the basket of eggs in and shut the lid.  Jeromy slept late and heavily.  He was known to drink his own homemade whisky, but he was not a mean drunk.  His children were not beaten, nor abused although gossip in the town said they were, and shamefully.

Jeromy's yard, in spring, would just be sprouting its growth of queen anne's  lace, which by summer would be head high and white and beautiful.  The fishing path maintained itself through all stages of the weed's growth.  But in spring the spongy path was surrounded by a fairy world of awakening green.

At the bend of the river, beneath the shade of a maple, would be Jeromy's children, Charlie and Lucy, 6 and 10 then, their willow fishing poles stuck in the mud bank and their lines lazily bobbing in the river.

Quietly Hap and Lola would take their spots on the bend with the children.  A smile was enough conversation early in the morning.  The children liked having Lola and Hap there.  Soon, after Hap's lines were set, it would feel right to talk.

"Have breakfast yet, Lucy?"  Hap would offer some bread and cold sausage.

"Yeah!  Had eggs."

"And some of the squirrel dad got, too!"  Charlie was quick to remind his sister.

"Yeah, Charlie.  And squirrel."

"Squirrel can be real good.  You ever eat it smoked?"  Hap said.

"Thissun is smoked."  Charlie piped in.

"Stewed,"  his sister corrected.

"I like 'em smoked!" Charlie insisted.  "You can go squirrel huntin' with me, Hap.  I help dad."

"Sure!  Some time you and me will go.  Sure thing."

Hap watched the river now and fished his pipe out of his flannel shirt.  He fumbled for his tobacco pouch.

"Ah, Christmas!  Only one smoke left, if that."  He heaved a heavy sigh knowing he'd have to borrow tobacco at the tavern or barter eggs or, worse, work.

He lit his pipe and the heavy smoke drifted down past Lola.  She liked the smell of her father's pipe.  She liked the beautiful smoke now and especially when the mornings got cold and a puff from his pipe seemed to conjure friendly ghosts.

Lola thought about this as she walked with Charlene.  The cold mid-November night surrounded them and now the Red Ball curved away from the Little Cedar and cut a diagonal through farm country. Lola could see the first lights of St. Albans about five miles distant.

Continued...