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Pride
William Wharton
When a 10-year-old boy befriends a carnival stuntman and his lion cub, he learns the true meaning of family, loyalty, love, and survival.For Dickie Kettleson, growing up during the Depression makes even the most ordinary aspects of life a struggle. His small street and family are his whole world, but hunger and collapse are never far away.Fory-year-old Cap Modig has already experienced his fair share of troubles. A former war hero and champion race driver, Cap now works in a carnival, travelling the open road with his fellow ‘carnie s’.Then, one day in October 1938, Cap and Dickie’s worlds collide, and change forever.



WILLIAM WHARTON
Pride


To my parents:
Sara Amelia
1905–1980
Albert Henry
1902–1975
What are weBut Family?
Contents
Title Page (#u395aee66-db32-5438-9274-883ed8d531c8)
Dedication (#uf4341b99-ede9-5b41-82f4-d1b6fda9cea5)
Prologue (#u9bb36227-c06a-5330-91b1-e7738038c3e3)
PART ONE (#u27ac7551-5036-5d84-be2e-4ed215965fa4)
PART TWO (#ua6109a89-f56e-50e7-8434-d946afa2c4c5)
PART THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
PART SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
PART SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
PART EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
PART NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by William Wharton (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue
On October 6, 1938, in Wildwood, New Jersey, a lion, part of a ‘Wall of Death’ motorcycle act, escaped from his cage on the boardwalk and killed a man.
On that day, Neville Chamberlain was negotiating with Adolf Hitler, giving him a large part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Jews throughout the world prayed, fasted, repented, atoned. They had little idea how, during the next seven horrible years, there would be much for all to atone.
Ann Sheridan sued for divorce and Martha Raye prepared to marry David Rose.
There was much labor unrest. The Great Depression was slowly lifting, and working men, though glad to be working again, were asking for a fairer share in profit and a promise of more job security. The A.F. of L. was preparing to shut down auto plants. The C.I.O. in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was battling company police at the steel mills. There was a garbage and trash collectors’ strike in Philadelphia, involving police intervention, violence and labor retaliation.
The day that lion escaped, I was one month short of my twelfth birthday. The previous summer I’d seen the ‘Wall of Death’ motorcycle act. It was the summer, also, when I first experienced a sexual as compared to a religious ejaculation.
There are some events that mark watersheds or cusps in life. The escape of that lion was one for me. It became a subconscious symbol, a foreboding, of all the violence and violation possible in life.
I began having a recurring nightmare. It haunted me for more than six years and lasted until W.W. II, when I went off and gathered material for worse nightmares.
In my ‘lion nightmare’ I’m living on a street much like the one described by Dickie in this book. I stand behind the front door to our house and look out through the glass panes, across our porch, down our front steps. Lions are strolling, stalking the streets, the lawns; they lurk silently between porches.
My mother and father, my sister, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and neighbors are walking around. They pay no attention to the lions.
With great trepidation, I dash out to warn them of the danger, their peril. But they ignore me, laugh, insist the lions are only friendly kittens.
In despair, I scamper back behind the security of my impervious front door. I watch as those I love are mauled, killed, destroyed by these marauding beasts.
Invariably, I woke from this dream sobbing uncontrollably, swallowed in a deep sense of loss.
This novel, despite the factual reality of the original tragedy, is a work of fiction. The characters, situations, sequences and events are products of my imagination. Any relationship to real events is purely coincidental.
Perhaps, in writing this, I am trying at last to exorcise my lions in the night, my personal succubi, or perhaps I’m still helplessly attempting to warn people of hidden dangers from behind my seemingly secure front door. I don’t know; it doesn’t matter.
But let us now begin, as Dickie Kettleson tells us about his pride, his territory.
WILLIAM WHARTON

PART ONE
Where I live, in Stonehurst Hills, there are rows of houses with alleys between them. These aren’t the same kind of alleys they have down in Philadelphia at my grandfather’s house. Those rows down there are older, were built before so many people had automobiles.
The rows we live in here, in Stonehurst, were built after the world war, when people started needing garages because they had cars.
At my grandfather’s, the alleys are only narrow walkways, wide as an ordinary sidewalk, with metal fences along the edges. There are gardens outside the back of each house, little tiny lawns, with flowers in the summer, lots of sunflowers and hollyhocks.
Also, at my grandfather’s house, you open two slanted cellar doors in the back garden and go down steps into the cellar, because those houses are built on flat streets, not hills.
Our alleys here were mostly built so cars could get into the garages. These garages are built under each of the houses. The alleys are wider, but, even so, it’s hard for two cars to pass in our alley, especially where there are still old-style porches with steps sticking out.
In our alley, the pavement’s cracked up so there’s nothing but pebbles and broken chunks of pavement. Also, everybody puts trashcans, ashcans or garbage cans back there and the street cleaner never comes down the alley so it’s all dirty and smelly.
The kitchens in our rows open onto the back porches. These porches are at least ten feet up in the air. If it weren’t for them, you could walk out the kitchen door, step off a brick cliff and kill yourself.
Whenever we’d knock down one of those old-style porches, my Dad’d always nail a few boards across the kitchen door, temporarily, so somebody wouldn’t forget and wind up smashed dead.
Our side of the alley is higher than the other because these rows are built along the side of a small hill. I guess that’s why they call this part where we live Stonehurst Hills. It’s a nice-sounding name for just rows of houses.
Our back porches are built out into the alleys and aren’t much. Each house in our row is sort of a reversed twin of the one next door. The old-style back porches were built so there was only one set of steps going up to each pair of houses. I don’t exactly know why they built those steps anyway; it’s easier, and makes more sense, to go through the kitchen, down the cellar stairs and out through the cellar door; that’s what everybody does.
The back porches are mostly used only to walk out on and hang clothes. Each house has a pulley clothesline going across the alley to the back of a house on the next street.
Our pulley has a line across to the McClosky place on Greenwood Avenue. They have one coming across to our place. All down the alley there are these pulleys with clotheslines.
The McCloskys are probably the only people we even know over on Greenwood Avenue. Nobody knows anybody on another row. In fact, I’m afraid to walk along Greenwood Avenue; there are some mean, tough kids living there, especially down near the end on the other side of the passageway. Practically none of them go to St Cyril’s where I go; mostly they go to Stonehurst, that’s the public school.
I don’t know when everybody agreed to put up those pulleys but it gives each house a chance to hang out clothes. In winter, or when it rains, we hang clothes in the cellar. On Mondays, in good weather, when most of the women in our neighborhood do the wash, you can hardly see down our alley for the wet clothes hanging out. Walking down that alley, coming home from school on Monday for lunch, there are so many clothes dripping it’s like walking through a rainstorm. And, on any day, there are almost enough clothes so you feel as if you’re walking under a tent.
There are fifty houses in our row, on our side of the street, the seventy hundred block of Clover Lane. There’s just that narrow passageway going through the alleys halfway down. The passageway is between 7048 and 7046. Our house is 7066.
The houses across the street, in front, uphill from us, have the odd numbers. There aren’t any numbers on houses in back alleys, the way there are on front. I know the McCloskys’ house must be 7067 Greenwood though I’ve never checked. It has to be.
As I said, we live on a hill. You wouldn’t know it, walking along any of the streets like Clover Lane or Radbourne Road or Greenwood Avenue because they’re all straight around the side of the hill. But going the other way, it is a hill. Radbourne Road is higher than Clover Lane and even the other side of Clover Lane is higher than our side. Our front lawn is flat but the lawns on the other side of the street are hills. It’s nicer having a flat front lawn for a garden but the hills are good for playing King of the Hill or digging tunnels.
One time I went into the front bedroom of Jimmy Malony’s house across the street on the hill side. I looked out his window there and could see all the way down the hill, all the way to Baltimore Pike almost. It was something I hadn’t expected. Jimmy’d taken me up to his parents’ room to show me some of his mother’s underwear but the view out that window interested me more.
We can’t see over top of the houses on Greenwood Avenue from our back bedrooms. Those houses are a little bit lower than our houses, so we drive up a small hill to get into our garage and they go down a little one to get into theirs. Still, we aren’t high enough so we can see over the houses on the other side of our alley. We just look smack into their windows surrounded by brick wall.
There are twelve steps up to the front porches of houses on the high side of Clover Lane. When you’re on the front porch of Jimmy Malony’s house you look right across into the bedroom windows of our side, but the street with the lawns and everything make it a long way across, so they probably can’t see anything, even with a spyglass.
It’s down in the alley where the iceman comes. He carries ice up the porch stairs if there are steps left: I mean if Dad and I haven’t built the new kind of porches without steps. If we have, the iceman comes through the cellar and up the cellar steps.
Most everybody has a yellow card in the kitchen window if they want ice; sometimes it’s in the cellar window. It has 25, 50, 75 and 100 printed in the corners. You turn it up to how many pounds of ice you want. If you don’t want any, you turn it backward. A few people are starting to have refrigerators now and don’t have cards in the windows.
If you’re in the alley when the ice truck comes, the iceman will always chip off a piece of ice for you, or sometimes there are pieces of ice splintered off from where he’s split a chunk of ice before. The floor part of the ice truck is wooden, soaked wet all the time and with shining silver metal tracks to make the ice slide easier. The iceman can cut off perfect cubes of ice or larger pieces just using his icepick. Sometimes it only takes one or two swings and he gets it cut through. He has a pair of big ice tongs and uses them to pick up the ice and throw it over his back onto a wet burlap sack. Our iceman is short, but he’s really strong. I don’t know where he lives and he doesn’t speak much American.
Also, the man who sells fruits and vegetables comes through our alley. His truck is old and painted dark green. He stops the truck and yells, ‘Fresh fruits, fresh vegetables’, but if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know what he’s saying: he runs it all together and practically sings. He’s Italian and is hard to understand.
When Mom sends me down to buy something from him, she always tells me to watch the scale and check the change because he’ll cheat me. But, so far as I can see, he cheats himself more than anybody. He always throws one more of anything onto the scale after he weighs it and charges for only the two pounds or whatever it is you’ve bought. Also, he usually gives me some fruit to eat, for free. He does this for everybody, not just me.
Down our alley also comes the man who sharpens knives and scissors and the man who scrapes horseradish from big horseradish roots. He mixes it in jars while you stand there; you have to bring your own jar. My dad loves horseradish. It makes me cry. I think it’d even make a horse cry. The ashman, trashman and garbage man come down our alley, too.
The milkman with his horse comes down the front street. He has a white horse with pale gray circles all over. This horse knows the milk route so well he goes from house to house without the milkman telling him. Mostly the milkman comes early in the morning and I never see him, but sometimes the bottles rattling in the metal holder or the sound of the horse’s hoofs wake me up and I’ll sneak down to watch him from our front porch. This is only in the summer when it’s light early in the morning.
In winter he comes in the dark. When it’s really cold the cream freezes in the bottle so it pushes right up, lifting the cardboard lid with the little tab, like the lid on a Dixie cup. That frozen cream is almost ice cream, and it’s delicious on cornflakes, shining slivers of ice tasting like cream.
The coal comes into the coal bin through a tiny window in front. We buy five tons a year. The coal truck is the same truck as the ice truck but two men drive it and they’re not our iceman.
The coal comes in big burlap sacks and the truck has a long metal coal chute attached. They stick it through the window into our cellar. One man dumps sacks of coal onto the chute and the other keeps it sliding along with a big shovel. The coal is wet and makes a lot of noise; coal is cheaper if you buy it in the summer so that’s what we do, even though the coalmen always break our snapdragons and tromp the grass flat.
One of my jobs is picking up the pieces of coal that fall on the lawn. I usually get half a bucket that way, and it keeps coal from getting caught in the lawn mower. I mow the lawn and trim edges in the summer. Trimming’s the hard part, especially around the picket fence. Dad put up the picket fence to keep dogs out of our yard; kids too, I think.
The breadmen come by in front, but that’s usually in the afternoon. There are two breadmen, Freihofer’s and Bond. My mother buys Bond the same way we buy the Bulletin for a newspaper, not the Ledger or the Inquirer. I don’t know why. There are so many things young kids are not supposed to know. I know we buy Abbott’s milk, Bond bread and the Bulletin. I also know we’ve never bought anything from J.I., not even light bulbs for three years and I know why we didn’t.
Now Dad’s back working for them I don’t know if we’ll start buying J.I. things again or not. J.I. stands for Jersey Industries. Dad told me it’s not like a Jersey cow but Jersey like the state. We live in Philadelphia but Dad works for J.I. That’s where the main plant is, New Jersey. I still don’t understand why he went back working for them. Also coming down the front street summers selling things is the ice-cream truck, and the man with the tiny merry-go-round for little kids.
One thing we have a lot of in our neighborhood is kids. There are almost more kids than there are dogs and cats. Most of the dogs and cats don’t belong to anybody but usually the kids do.
I like the alley better than the front street. There’s something secret about it, everything’s so real back there. Nobody’s putting out bird baths without water or planting flowers. It’s just the way it is and I like it. The front porches are mostly all painted and some people even have enclosed front porches. We have one of the only trees on our street. It’s actually in the middle of the lawn we share with the Robins next door. The Reynolds on our other side have a tree, too, they share with the Fennimores next to them; it’s not quite as tall as our tree. These trees are the kind that grow up straight; they’re the tallest things around our neighborhood. Taller than the telly poles, even. Any other kind of tree, like the kind that sends out side branches, wouldn’t find any space. Everything’s jammed in awfully tight around us in Stonehurst.
The highest part of the hill we’re on, starts up at Clifton Road, which is on the high side of Radbourne Road. Then, after Radbourne, it’s Clover Lane, below us is Greenwood Avenue. The other side of Greenwood Avenue opens up on a big open lot where we look for snakes, break bottles, burn Christmas trees, those kinds of things.
The street that actually goes down the hill, just five houses toward Long Lane from our house, is Copely Road. It’s the best sledding hill close by. For real sledding, we go over to the golf course by Upper Darby Junior High School. There are some good hills there. But Copely Road’s fine for ordinary sledding. When the snow’s packed hard you can go all the way from Clifton Road alley way down past the end of the vacant lot, almost to where Copely Road turns up toward Guilford Road and out to Long Lane again. Long Lane is where most of the stores are; that is, except for the Little Store.
Not everybody in our neighborhood has cars, so a lot of the garages are empty. Some people use them to store extra stuff and some men have workshops in them. The Hershafts built the Little Store in their garage. It’s one of the only places you can buy food or milk with only a piece of paper you sign and no real money.
But you have to live in the neighborhood for Mrs Hershaft to let you do that. My mother says everything is always more expensive at the Little Store, but a lot of times we buy food there, especially things like milk or soap or cans of soup or sugar. It’s a place my mother can send Laurel or me to buy something and not worry.
My mom worries a lot; that’s the way she is.
We do the real shopping up on Long Lane in the A & P or the American Store. Saturdays we go to the Giant Tiger on Baltimore Pike, when Dad drives us over there.
My father has a car. It’s a car that was in a crash and wasn’t running. Mr Carlson sold it to him for five dollars. He worked on it in our garage and got it running again. He cut off the crushed back, made it into a kind of truck, and painted it gray with some of our porch paint. It’s a Ford Model A car but it doesn’t look like any ordinary car. We use it to haul the wood for building porches.
My father and I build porches on weekends to pay off our back rent. For a long time Dad didn’t have any job because of the Depression. When the Depression came, J.I. laid off everybody, with only two weeks’ notice, including my father. There was nothing he could do about it. Most of the people on our street didn’t have jobs either. Everybody was on relief or working for the WPA.
During that Depression time, we got three years behind in our rent. Mr Marsden, who collects the rents, let us stay on in the house because there was nobody with any money to move in if we left. If a house is left empty in our neighborhood, all the windows get broken and even the front-porch railings get stolen for firewood. Some people move out in the night without paying the back rent.
When somebody moves, everybody helps. They’ll have an old truck or a bunch of cars and they’ll move away all the furniture in the dark. A lot of people have their electricity and gas cut off because they can’t pay those either, so they can’t live in the house any more.
My dad helped people like the O’Haras across the street and the Sullivans move. Even if anybody knew where these people moved to, they wouldn’t say, so Mr Marsden wouldn’t find out. I don’t know what the police could do to those people if they did catch them. Nobody has much money except rich people, and you can’t throw everybody in jail.
It was a couple years ago when my dad got the idea of building a new porch on our place. Mom was scared to go out on our old little rotten wooden porch to hang our clothes. Dad got the Reynolds next door to pay for the wood, by promising he’d do the work himself. Mr Reynolds works in a drugstore. We call him a pharmacist because it’s a nice idea to think you live next door to a real pharmacist, but he only works in a store in Media selling things like lipstick and corn plasters. But he has a job.
Dad built one straight porch across our two places, without any steps. It was a regular deck like the deck of a ship. He put down new posts to hold it up further out than the old posts but it still didn’t go as far out into the alley as the old steps did. This new porch is ten times bigger than the old one. It’s almost’s big as the front porch and has sun on it in the morning. On our side of the street there’s never any sun on our front porch, even in summer.
Now, with our big porch, Mom isn’t afraid when she hangs out clothes; and we go downstairs through the cellar.
She and Mrs Reynolds made Dad put wire on the railing so nobody could fall off. Little Jimmy Reynolds is only three and Mrs Reynolds can have him out there in the sun and watch him from the kitchen while she’s cooking and washing dishes.
Of course, Dad had to get Mr Marsden’s permission so he could build this porch, but since the old one was falling apart anyway he said O.K.
When Mr Marsden saw it finished, he asked Dad how much it would cost to have porches like that one built on other houses. I was right there. I’d never seen Mr Marsden before. He was driving a new Dodge car, and wore a suit with a tie. I think it might be the first time I ever saw anybody dressed like that in the daytime, except in the movies.
Dad looked up at the porch, then at me. He said to Mr Marsden, ‘I can build a porch like this, materials included, for sixteen dollars.’
Mr Marsden looked at the porch again.
‘I’ll tell you what, Mr Kettleson. I’ll knock twenty dollars off your back rent for every porch you build me.’
The materials cost less than seven dollars, so Dad could make thirteen dollars’ profit for every porch he built. Our rent is twenty-eight dollars a month so he could pay off our back rent pretty fast building porches on Saturdays. Only, somehow, we had to save that seven dollars for the wood, nails and paint.
Dad explained all this to me afterward because he wanted me to help him. I’d watched him build the first porch but I didn’t help.
This is the way we’d do it. First, we’d buy our wood at the big lumber yard on Marshall Road. Dad’d buy enough at one time to build three porches. Mom wasn’t too happy because he was using the emergency money they’d saved for doctor bills, but Dad wanted to get that back rent paid; it really bothered him, owing money.
Then, we’d go down in the cellar. Dad had all the measurements for everything, even the railings. I’d mark the wood from his measurements and hold the long ends while he cut the lumber to length. We could do all the cutting for a porch at once, usually on Friday nights. At first I used to worry I’d mark something wrong and ruin valuable wood but then I got good at it.
Somehow, Dad found out about gray paint for battleships on sale, cheap, at the Navy yard. He went down there and bought four barrels of that gray paint. They were big as ashcans and we stored them in the cellar on the other side from the furnaces, at the bottom of the steps under our dart board. All the porches we built we painted with this gray paint. Then, early Saturday mornings, unless it was raining hard or too cold, we’d go out.
First we’d tear down the old porch. We have crowbars for this and Dad showed me how to start at the top so nothing fell down on us. The last thing to go would be the rickety old steps; there were sixteen of them. Then we’d chop and saw the old steps and posts into pieces and stack them in the back of our car, where we’d carried the new wood for the new porch. The new lumber we’d have laid in the alley in a certain way so I can hand each piece to Dad as he needs it. He has it all worked out.
He has his tools lined up in a wooden box with a place for each tool. My dad has good tools from the days when he was a carpenter with his dad. There are two saws, one rip and one cross; two hammers, both Stanley, one carpenter, one mason; a level, chisels, everything you need to build. He has another wooden box he built for nails. Eight sections for different-sized nails, from four- to sixteen-penny with and without heads.
The old wood we’d take home at the end of the day and store in our cellar. We’d burn this in the furnace to save on coal during winter.
Next, Dad would bolt the wooden beam called a plate onto the wall. He’d stand on our ladder while I’d hold the bottom and hand things up to him. After that, we’d set in the cut-off-pyramid-shaped concrete foundation blocks to hold the posts for the new porch. These had bolts sticking straight up from the top where they were cut off. We’d set the posts up and Dad would stand up high on the ladder, with me holding it, so he could pound in the framing for the deck.
After that, we’d be up there, working from above, nailing down deckboards and putting on railings. About then, I’d start painting. Dad would nail along fast and we’d usually end up at about the same time. From start to finish we could put up a porch in under five hours.
At first, I hated losing my Saturdays, especially when it was school time. We worked Saturdays almost as long as a school day, and the only free day I’d have left would be Sunday. Sunday mornings are ruined by getting dressed, going to church, then having a big breakfast afterward. It’s eleven o’clock before I can even change into play clothes.
But I didn’t say anything. Then, gradually, I learned to like working with my dad. Not many kids have time alone with their dads.
He’d try to tell me the little important things about building, how to hold the hammer and swing from my wrist. You let the head of the hammer do the work. He showed me how to bear down with the saw only on the down stroke and just pull it back, letting the saw glide. He taught me how to load a brush with paint, how to hold it in my hands so I wouldn’t get blisters, and how to tip the handle in the direction I pulled the brush, stroking with the grain of the boards.
We’d talk about other things, too. He’s always asking about school, what I’m learning, if I like it. I don’t lie to him; I tell him how I hate school and don’t think I’m learning much, how I’m bored all the time.
Dad only went to eighth grade and keeps telling me over and over how there’s no chance if you don’t have a college education. As far as I’m concerned, eighth grade seems about right, only four more years not counting this one. By then, I could probably make enough money just building porches.
Dad put up a chart in the cellar and marked on it every month’s rent we were behind. When we started, there were thirty-five squares, seven across and five down. When we’d come in from work he’d cross one off. Once a month he didn’t; that was for the month we were living in.
Mr Marsden was the one who told us which porches to build. It was always the porches of people who were paid up with their rent. It wasn’t very fair; most of the worst porches were people who didn’t have any money. When some of those’d start to sag or fall down, we’d stop on the way to or back from a job and Dad would put a brace here, or a few nails there, to help hold them up. He did this for nothing. Lots of times people didn’t even know who’d fixed their porch.
After a while, you could walk down those alleys and tell from the new gray porches without stairs, the ones we built, just who were the people with jobs. Anybody selling things from door to door would be smart to walk down the alleys first and look to see who had any money.
During two years, from the time I was eight till now, we built more than seventy porches. Sometimes in the summer we’d do two porches in one Saturday. Those days we wouldn’t get finished until it was almost dark. We’d take our lunch and only come home for supper. Mom didn’t like us to do two but we were proud of ourselves.
We got all that back rent paid up. I remember the day we came back and Dad crossed the last box off. He gave me his paper chart, which was brown and marked with paint now. One of the thumbtacks was always falling out so there were a hundred thumbtack holes across the top of the paper. It was a used piece of butcher paper he pulled out of the trashcan and it had meat marks on the other side.
‘Here, Dickie, throw this in the furnace; we’re finished. From now on we’ll be getting ahead of the game.’
He stood there, wiping paint off his hands with some turpentine while I pulled open the furnace door and threw the paper in. It went up with a quick puff of light. That was just before this summer.
We kept working, building porches over the summer till we were a whole year ahead in rent. We finished just before school started. That last night when we came in, Dad stored his tools under his bench instead of setting them on top where he usually did.
‘This whole year is like money in the bank, Dickie. In a certain way, for a whole year this house is really ours. But we aren’t going to work any more Saturdays while school’s on; you can have your Saturdays for yourself, now. Maybe next summer we’ll go back to work if we have to.’
He stopped, smiled, pulled the straps of his white carpenter’s overalls down over his shoulders. He had regular clothes on under his overalls. It was summer but it was cold and wet that day. It wasn’t raining but it was wet enough so it was hard to make the paint stick. He was wearing his old sweater with the holes in the elbows and all raveled at the cuffs.
‘You remember this, Dickie. No matter how much you earn in your life you haven’t made one dime if you haven’t put some little bit aside. If you only earn it and spend it right off, you get nothing for your days, you’re just a working machine, working for somebody else. The money you save is work you did for yourself, and the only thing really worth buying is your own time. You remember that.’
By this time, Dad had gotten the letter from J.I. saying they were opening again and there was a job for him. They were going to pay him $37.50 a week. That’s more than twice as much as he got with the WPA. Waxing floors in banks all night he made $22, at the most.
I was there when he opened that letter. It’d come in the morning but Dad had already gone to sleep after coming home from the waxing job. He’d get up when we came home from school for lunch and we’d all eat together, then he’d go back to work after we had dinner.
Lunch in our house is usually just tomato soup, pepper pot, or Scotch broth and sandwiches but it was fun having Dad there. He’d always have some funny story to tell about waxing the bank floors. His favorite was how he’d push the machine, waxing away, and keeping his eyes open in case somebody had dropped a little bit of all that money on the floor during the day. He’d tell the story going along as if he’d really found some money, but it would always turn out to be a Wrigley gum wrapper, or somebody’s handkerchief or, one time, it was an empty pencil box. I know if Dad did find money he’d give it back to the bank, but it was fun listening to those stories; it was the way he told them.
His other stories were about the waxing machine breaking down. These machines were old and I think only my father could really keep them going. He worked with three other men but they didn’t know anything about machines, not even the boss, Roy Kerlin.
But this day, at lunch, Mom gave Dad the letter that came in the mail. She was all excited. Dad sat down and broke pieces of bread into his tomato soup; he put the letter on the table beside him and just looked at it, breaking bread into his soup. Mother couldn’t sit down and was leaning over his shoulder. It was one of those envelopes with a little cellophane window in it so you could see my father’s name and our address, 7066 Clover Lane, Upper Darby. It didn’t say anything about Stonehurst Hills.
‘Come on, Dick. Open it, I’ve been waiting on pins and needles all morning for you to wake up. Come on, open it. Don’t just stare at it like that.’
Dad looked up at Mom, put his hand over her hand on his shoulder. ‘I can’t think of anything J.I. could have to say to me I’m really ready to hear, Laura. Even if they say they’re sorry they shut down the place just because they weren’t making enough profit, laying everybody off, even somebody like me, with nine years’ seniority. I don’t really think I’d be interested even in that.’
But he used his knife to slit open the envelope; there was still some margarine on it. Then he read it out. He leaned back in his chair, speaking slowly like a priest reading the Gospel. He read how there was work and a position was open for him at the same bench and the salary was thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents a week. There was a lot of other stuff, too, about when and where he was to report and everything, but that was the main part.
Mom squeezed Dad around the neck from behind while he still held on to the letter. His bread was sinking into his soup. I looked over at Laurel; she wasn’t paying much attention. I couldn’t look at Mom or Dad, maybe she couldn’t either.
‘Thirty-seven dollars a week! But, Dick, that’s wonderful. You could stop working nights and wouldn’t have to spend all your Saturdays building porches any more. Aren’t you excited?’
Dad stared at the letter. He glanced up at me, then back at the letter.
‘I don’t mind building porches, Laura. We have a good time out there in the alleys, don’t we, Dickie?’
I nodded my head but I couldn’t smile. I was hoping he wouldn’t take the job. Going back to J.I. would be like saying ‘uncle’ in a fight.
It was a Wednesday when Dad got that letter. He was supposed to report at the main plant on Monday. It was all Mom and Dad talked about for the rest of that week. I tried to listen whenever I could, but a lot of the talking they did in their bedroom, and Laurel and I aren’t allowed in there unless we’re invited. Mom wanted Dad to take the job because it was such good money and it was hard to get jobs. Dad didn’t want to work there because of the way they fired him. One time coming down the stairs on Friday, he said, ‘But I hate that place, Laura. I hate everything about it. I don’t like the people I work with and I don’t like the work; it’s dirty, hard and dangerous. The whole building is dark and damp; they even have the windows painted blue so we can’t see out. It’s like a jail. I’ll bet they get Sanderson back as foreman, too. I can’t stand that guy.’
Saturday night at dinner he said he was going to take the job. He said he had a responsibility to all of us. He said we’d have enough money for things we needed and Mom wouldn’t have to worry so much. He promised us we’d go to Wildwood in the summer when he had two weeks’ vacation. It’d been four years since we’d been to the shore. I hardly even remembered it.
I still didn’t want him to work for J.I. and I was ashamed, but I couldn’t get myself to say anything.
‘But I told your mother, and I’m telling you kids right now; I’m going back there to start a union if there isn’t one, or join one if there is. A union is the only tool the working man has to fight back with.’
I know this doesn’t mean anything to Laurel, but I can tell it scares Mom. I don’t know why he has to tell us. Then, and right now, there are big fights between the companies and the unions. I guess the Depression made a lot of the men like Dad mad. It makes me feel better knowing Dad is going to fight J.I. even if he is going back, so I guess that’s why he told us, he was really telling me.
But I’d rather be building porches. We could build porches for other people than Mr Marsden. Then Dad’d be his own boss and I could work for him. Maybe I could even get out of going to school.
There was a workers’ union at J.I. The United Electrical Workers, called the UEW. Dad joined it right away and before long he was elected shop steward. This means he represents all the men on his floor to the bosses. He’s a kind of boss against bosses.
One night about a month after that, Dad came home late. The dinner was in the oven and Mom wouldn’t let us eat even though it was past seven o’clock, and usually we eat at five-thirty. Dad came in and one whole side of his face was swollen, with his lip cut and his shirt ripped. Mom almost went crazy.
Dad climbed upstairs to the bathroom and Mom ran right up behind him. When he came down he had some Mercurochrome and bandages on his face and a bandage on one finger that was bent back. He’d been beaten up just outside the gates of J.I. by some men the company hired to beat up union men, especially shop stewards like Dad. Dad ate his dinner quietly, grunting once in a while when he forgot and chewed on the wrong side; Mom kept crying.
After that, Dad starts meeting with other men and they go to work and come home together. Dad begins carrying a monkey wrench in his pocket, both to work and home again. He calls the people who beat him up ‘company goons’. In Popeye comics, there’s a character called Alice the Goon. She has a tiny head with no hair, a big body with thick arms and huge hairy feet. I keep thinking the company goons are something like Alice. Maybe Mom’s right; I’m probably too young to be afraid enough.
I start going up to meet Dad where he gets out of the car he rides in to work with the other men. It’s at the corner of Radbourne Road; Hershafts’ Little Store is right there.
I meet Dad outside the Little Store and walk home with him. Lots of times he stops in and buys me some candy or bubble gum or sometimes Tastykake cupcakes. He always says the same thing.
‘Share this with Laurel and don’t eat any of it until after dinner. You know what Mother would say.’
When he comes home, even when he isn’t beaten up, he’s always white-faced, tired and dirty. He told me there are showers and a place to change clothes at work but he wants to get home early and he likes to start with clean work clothes every morning.
We have an old washing machine and hand wringer in the cellar. Dad found that old washing machine in the dump and fixed it up. He rewired the motor. Dad can fix almost anything. Mom fills that washer with his clothes every Saturday and washes them separately; they’re too dirty to put in with other clothes.
Dad always comes home through the alley and in the cellar door. He takes off his shoes down there and scrapes the black grease off them, leaving them by the furnace to dry. Whatever he does at work I don’t know, but it makes his shoes oily and wet. I know he’s working on big circuit breakers but that doesn’t mean anything to me. They’re being built for a giant dam in Russia somewhere. Dad told me that. It makes him proud to work on something that’s going all the way to Russia.
Then Dad goes upstairs and takes a bath. I’ve watched him scrub his hands with a brush and 23 Skiddoo hand cleaner till he almost wore the skin off. When he comes down to dinner he’s always fresh in a white shirt with his sleeves turned up two turns to hide the frayed cuffs, but he looks clean and you’d never know he does such dirty work. The only thing that shows is he always has broken fingernails and bandages or a finger or thumb that’s been hurt. He usually has at least one finger black and the nail working its way off, too.
About that same time is also when I found Mr Harding. Mr Harding lived at 7048 Clover Lane, the same side of the street we live on, next to the areaway. Mr Harding used to have a good job selling Four Roses whiskey. He was a salesman and sold Four Roses to bars and restaurants, but he lost his job when the Depression came.
My mother said he lost it because he drank too much. Every bar or restaurant would give him a drink when he came in, and then he’d get drunk and couldn’t sell anything. Four Roses wanted him to sell whiskey but not drink it, I guess.
Anyway, Mr Harding was on relief like about half the people in our neighborhood but he never looked for work. His wife got a job as a waitress at a bar up on Westchester Pike called the Sail Inn. Dad said you sailed in and staggered out. She ran away with the bartender there, at least that’s what the kids in the neighborhood say.
One Saturday morning, early, I was meandering down the alley looking for things on trash day. Even with everybody so poor, there is always something worthwhile in the trash. If you wait until it gets to the dump, most of the best stuff’s already been picked over by the guys on the truck, so you need to go out before seven and look before they come.
It was the beginning of that summer when we were building those last porches, but we didn’t work early Saturday mornings because that’s the day when Dad and Mom sleep late.
One morning I found a perfectly good Sunbeam toaster worth twelve dollars new. My dad fixed it in about an hour. It’s the kind that makes a ticking sound like a clock while it’s toasting the bread, then pops up the toast when it’s finished.
I also found an old portable Victrola in a black leather case like a suitcase. It’s one of those ones you wind up. Dad fixed that, too, and I keep it in the cellar to play sometimes in the evenings when I’ve finished homework or in summer when it’s too hot outside. I play old records Aunt Sophia gave me. They have great titles like ‘Just Like Washington Crossed the Delaware, General Pershing Will Cross the Rhine’, and ‘It’s the Japanese Sandman’.
So I’m going down the alley rummaging through trashcans and sometimes peeking into a garage when I look into Mr Harding’s garage and see him sitting all alone in his car in the garage. He looks blue and fat but I just think he’s drunk, maybe drove home, then fell asleep in his car before he could get out and go upstairs.
I go on down the alley and then back up the other side. When I get to Mr Harding’s garage, I peek in and he’s still there. It doesn’t look as if he’s even moved. I’m still thinking he’s only drunk when I go into the garage. But then I see his eyes are open, staring through the windshield, and his tongue is purple and swollen, sticking out of his mouth. His thick hands are wrapped tight on the steering wheel.
I’m sure he’s dead when I see the vacuum-cleaner hose attached to the tail pipe and going in the back window. It’s the first dead person I’ve ever seen except for my grandmother, my mother’s mother, and Aunt Emmaline. But they were different, in white coffins, and with flowers all around.
I run out of the garage, leaving the two comic books and a torn-in-half Little Orphan Annie Big Little Book I’d found on the Greenwood side at the end of the alley. I run home trying not to cry and trying at the same time to get my breath. I’ve never fainted but I think I’m almost doing it.
As I go in the cellar door, I first begin thinking how I’m going to tell Mom; and how I can keep from telling Laurel. I stand there and think of waiting till Dad comes home and telling him, I also think of going across the street, at the corner, on the other side of Clover Lane, and telling Mr Fitzgerald. He’s a policeman. But then I think how it might be a murder and they might think I did it. So by the time I get to the top of the cellar stairs I’m already yelling for Mom and crying.
She’s washing dishes in her dressing gown and comes running, thinking I’m hurt or something. She drops to her knees the way she always does when she wants to really look at me and see if something’s wrong, although now, when she does that, my head’s higher than hers.
‘Mr Harding’s in his car in his garage and he’s dead.’
‘What do you mean he’s dead?’
She’s still not believing me. She doesn’t look scared.
‘He’s sitting in his car and he’s blue and his eyes are open. He’s not drunk. He has the tube of his vacuum cleaner going from the back window to the tail pipe where the poison gas comes out. I think he’s dead, Mom.’
I’m shaking now and can hardly talk. Dead people look so alive and at the same time so dead. Mom stands up. She’s not looking at me now. She grabs her dark reddish hair by both sides over her ears and stares at me with her wide green-gray eyes. Sometimes her eyes look like the green stuff that grows on the creek in summer, they’re that green; now they’re more white green.
‘Oh my God! Are you sure?’
She knows I’m sure. She grabs hold of me, gives me a short hug, then dashes out from the kitchen, through the dining room, the living room and out our front door over to the Guinans’ to telephone the police.
It turned out he was dead all right. They drove an ambulance and police cars right up our alley. My mom made me stay home through it all, but Doug Zigenfus saw it and said Mr Harding was so stiff they couldn’t straighten him out to put him on the stretcher, so he was on his back with his knees and hands out in front of him as if he was still sitting in his car, driving up a steep hill or a wall; driving straight up to heaven, maybe.
The police came and asked me a lot of questions. They wanted to know what exact time I found him but I didn’t know; I don’t have a watch. They made me guess and I said about seven o’clock. They wanted to know why I went into the garage and I told them about seeing Mr Harding sitting in there alone and about thinking he might be drunk.
They even wanted to know what I was doing walking around the alley that early in the morning. I didn’t want to tell them I was taking things from trashcans because that might be stealing so I said I was looking at some of the porches my dad and I had built. That wasn’t a lie because I was doing that, too. I like looking at those porches; it makes me think I’m doing something like a grown person, even though Dad does most of the work.
Then they left us alone.
There was just a tiny bit in the Bulletin and the Ledger. The Inquirer didn’t even mention it. But the little paper, our Upper Darby paper, had a whole column on the first page, with a picture of Mr Harding dressed up in a suit, looking younger. They even mentioned my name as finding him. I was a kind of hero for several weeks there. Then Elizabeth Zane from down the street got run over by an automobile at the corner of Clover Lane and Copely. She was almost killed so she spent more than a month in the hospital. After that, everybody pretty much forgot about Mr Harding; but I didn’t.
It was then I really started thinking about being dead and what it was to die. It didn’t look as if Mr Harding had gone to hell even though he had committed suicide and was condemned. He just looked as if he’d swollen up and turned blue.
When school started this year I was still thinking about Mr Harding a lot. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I even dreamed about him and I hardly even knew Mr Harding. I cut his lawn a couple times for a dime but that’s all.
Sister Anastasia is our fifth-grade teacher. As I said, I hate school and one of the ways I get through some days is day-dreaming. I don’t do it on purpose. My mind just goes off on its own, dreaming, thinking about things. One morning, I’m thinking about Mr Harding during religion class. We have religion first thing and it’s the most boring of all because all we do is memorize parts of the Catechism. We don’t really talk about religion at all, like, What’s being alive all about? What’s it like to be dead? We’re only memorizing and I hate that.
We’re studying the seven capital sins, Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy and Sloth. I’m still not sure what covetousness and sloth are. Coveting is also part of two of the Ten Commandments. It has something to do with wanting something you can’t have, but how’s that different from Envy?
We’re all taking turns standing up and saying the answer to the Catechism question Sister Anastasia asks each of us. She asks each person the same question each time, although we all know what the question’s going to be. We have to stand up and wait while she asks that same dumb question. I sit in the first row and I’ve already answered, so I know I have time for myself; that’s when my mind takes off.
The desks we sit in have slanted tops and the seats are hooked to them with curved metal tubes. The slanted part opens and there’s a place inside where you can put your books. At the very top of the desk is a narrow, flat part with a little dent for holding a pencil or a pen and there’s a hole with a bottle of ink sunk in it with a black Bakelite top and a black Bakelite cover that slides back and forth to open a hole into the bottle part where the ink is.
These inkwells are for when we write with ink. We’re never allowed to use fountain pens; we have to use these awful pens they sold us. There’s a pen holder and little pen points which fit into them. Mostly we only do Palmer Method. Once in a while we have to write a composition with those pens, but mostly it’s Palmer Method.
I can never write a composition without making big spraying blots. The points of these pens are very pointy and are split into two thin parts tight together with a hole for holding ink between them. My pen always gets stuck in the paper and then sprays over everything; or sometimes all the ink just rolls out of the pen and makes a big solid blot.
The Palmer Method is where you go across the page making up and down lines between the lines on the paper, or round and round things, where if you do it right it looks like a tunnel you could see through. But I can never do it. You’re supposed to roll on the ball of your palm, holding the pen lightly in your fingers, gliding your little finger on the paper, and that way you get a nice smooth movement.
But it’s not the way I write. I hold a pen hard in my fingers, then move my fingers to write with. The way I do Palmer Method when nobody’s watching is turn the paper sideways and make those up and down lines and circles from top to bottom. That way I can do it, almost. But it isn’t Palmer Method; I don’t even use my palm.
The worst part is dipping that pointy pen in the glass inkwell. It scrapes against the bottom; hairs rise on the back of my neck, and my ears feel empty. Everybody in the class jams those pens in the inkwells hard, on purpose, but they can all do Palmer Method.
We aren’t allowed to open our slanted desks unless we’re told to. Usually the nun will say, ‘Now let’s open our desks and take out our reading books’ or our civics books, or something. That’s one of the most interesting things that happens all day. At least there’s something new to see: the inside of the desk. One of the ways my mind wanders is trying to remember everything inside the desk and where it is. I want just one time to put this picture in my mind and then look in the desk and find everything the way it is in my head.
This morning, during religion class, the first thing I know an eraser has hit me smack on the forehead. It’s a blackboard eraser and isn’t hard. It doesn’t hurt but it’s filled with chalk dust; so, chalk dust, like smoke, flies around my head. The whole class is giggling and laughing. Sister Anastasia, who’s a fat nun, is standing up behind her desk in her dark blue habit with the white bib. She has some other stiff white stuff wrapped close around her face holding in the fat sides. There’s a dark blue veil over that too. She’s wearing the most shiny glasses I’ve ever seen, no metal around them, just thick glass. You can hardly see her eyes.
‘All right, Kettleson. Are you deaf?’
‘No, Sister.’
‘Then answer the question.’
Of course I figure she’s asking about those seven capital sins again. I start out.
‘The seven capital sins are Pride …’
I stop. The whole class is giggling. Sister Anastasia comes out from behind the desk. She has her ‘signal’ in her hand. I’ve already been hit on the hands with that thing for not paying attention, and it’s only the second week of school. It’s wooden and has a hard knob at the end. There’s a rubber band or something in the handle, and Sister can make a clicking noise with it when she wants things quiet; but mostly I think it’s for hitting kids with, at least that’s the way Sister Anastasia uses it. I’m ready for another knock on the knuckles.
‘Pick up that eraser and put it on the chalk rail here, young man.’
She points at the chalk rail behind her. I lean down and find the eraser under Mary Jane Donahue’s desk. It bounced against her, too, and there’s a white mark on the side of her uniform, but she’s keeping her hands crossed on the desk with her thumbs overlapped the way we’re supposed to do when we’re not writing. The thumbs crossed over each other like that are supposed to make a real cross and be a way of praying to God.
I carry that eraser to the front of the room and put it on the chalk rail.
‘Now put your hand out.’
I put it out and she gives me three good raps with her ‘signal’. She’s strong for a fat woman. The tears are coming into my eyes and I’m so mad I almost just run out the door, only I start back to my desk. The whole class is trying not to look at me, but I can hear them laughing inside. I don’t blame them; there isn’t much to laugh about in school. But I’m mad.
I go back to my desk and Sister Anastasia tells me to stand up again. ‘Kettleson, just what was it you were thinking about when you should’ve been listening to your Catechism?’
Before I can say anything, she starts up again.
‘Children, this is a perfect example of the sin of Pride. Kettleson thinks he knows more than God’s word. Catechism is God’s word made easy for young people. If you don’t pay attention to God’s word then you’re guilty of the first capital sin, Pride. Now, what were you thinking about instead of listening to God?’
I don’t want to lie. I especially don’t want to lie to a nun, even if it is Sister Anastasia.
‘I was thinking about what it is to be dead, Sister.’
She stares at me, shining circles in her glasses. Nobody moves in the class.
‘Just what do you mean by that, young man?’
‘I don’t know, Sister. That’s what I was thinking: how it must feel being dead.’
‘If you’d pay attention to your Catechism you’d know. You’d either be in Heaven with God, in Purgatory working out your salvation or in Hell burning for all eternity.’
She pauses, turning her head to take in all the class.
‘And I don’t have much doubt as to where you’re headed, Kettleson.’
I stand there. What’s there to say? I’m wondering if there’s much difference between what she’s just said and saying ‘Damn you’ to somebody.
‘Kettleson, I think for the good of your soul you should come up here, kiss this crucifix and pray for God’s forgiveness.’
She motions me to the front of the room again. The rooms have scrubbed wooden floors and they’re laid so they lead up and down the room. I walk up toward her with my head down, trying to walk on a single board and trying not to cry. When I get close to her, I smell the smell of a nun, the smell of baby powder and ironed clothes. She pushes me down onto my knees and holds out her large crucifix at the end of the giant-sized rosary wrapped around her waist. All the nuns in this school have rosaries like this around their waists. On the thin ones, it hangs practically to the ground, but with Sister Anastasia it comes to just below her belly, just about where my face is when she’s pushed me onto my knees. I kiss the crucifix and wipe my mouth. Then, I spit on the floor.
It’s something I do automatically; it isn’t meant as an insult or anything. The taste of metal in my mouth always makes me want to spit. When I’m working with Dad he keeps nails in his mouth so they’re handy, but when I’ve tried it, I drool around them and have to keep taking them out of my mouth to spit. It’s the same way with toy whistles, anything metal in my mouth makes spit spring up. Also, I’m nervous and not thinking.
Sister Anastasia grabs me by the hair and yanks me to my feet. She’s dragging me out of the room and I’m too scared to listen to what she’s saying except she’s taking me down to Father Lanshee because I’ve committed a sacrilege, spitting at the crucifix and spitting at a nun. I guess she believes that’s what happened. I try not to yell, not to cry, but she’s twisting my hair in her hands so it hurts and she’s pulling hair out.
We need to go outside the school to get to the rectory and she stands at the door, rings the bell. We don’t talk at all while we wait for the housekeeper to open it.
Father Lanshee finally comes himself and tells Sister to let go of my hair. Father Lanshee is young and short with tight curly hair. He’s the one you go see when it’s even more important than going to see Mother Superior. Sister Anastasia tells him what happened, that is, from the way she sees it.
Father Lanshee looks at me.
‘And what do you have to say for yourself? Why have you done a thing like this, one of our youngest and finest altar
boys?’
Father Lanshee is from Ireland and has an accent. He’s the one who taught me to be an altar boy when I was in fourth grade. I learned the Latin fast enough so during the summer I was the only fourth grader to serve mass.
‘I didn’t mean it, Father. It was only the metal on my lips.’
‘Are you trying to tell me Sister Anastasia is lying to me or maybe she’s seeing things? She says you spit on the crucifix and at her. Is that true?’
It’s in his voice. He believes her and he’s mad. ‘I only spit on the floor. Father, I didn’t mean it.’
He looks over at Sister Anastasia. Then I look over at her, too. She’s standing with her arms folded across her fat stomach so the bib is pushed up almost like a table under her face. Father hits me hard on the side of my head with the back of his hand. It feels as if my ear is burning off and I know this is only the beginning.
‘There must be a devil in you to do a thing like that, Kettleson, spit on the crucifix and spit at a nun!’
He has his face down next to mine and it’s getting red. He’s red all the way up into his curly hair. I can’t turn my mind off from seeing things like that even when I’m probably about to be killed.
He grabs me by the other ear with his finger and thumb. He starts dragging me with him through the rectory and out the back door, the one that opens into the church. I’m learning not to say anything; there’s nothing to say anyway.
He takes me into the church, leads me down the aisle, opens the gate in the altar rail and pushes me down to my knees again at the foot of the steps to the altar. Sister Anastasia isn’t with us. I peek back under my arm and she’s kneeling at the altar rail with her hands praying and her eyes watching me behind those shiny glasses, through the silver circles.
Father Lanshee, with his arms folded, is standing between me and the tabernacle. ‘You stay there and pray to God for your immortal soul. Sister Anastasia, you pray for him, too. I think he must be possessed.’
He goes into the sacristy and comes out with the censer, filling it with incense. He also has the round gold thing with a handle they use to sprinkle holy water. I’m scared and I’m crying but I’m trying to pray. Father Lanshee puts his stole around his neck. This makes him a priest, officially. He kisses it before he slips it over his head. I look up at the altar with the Gospel on one side and the Missal on the other. I almost didn’t get to be an altar boy because I couldn’t reach up and lift that Gospel high enough to move it to the other side without scraping and making the altar cloth crooked. I needed to strain up on my tiptoes to do it. Then, carrying it down the steps and genuflecting when you can’t see past it is another hard thing; and that Gospel’s heavy. Besides, you have on a surplice so you can easily trip. I practiced moving the Gospel a lot before I got good enough to say a mass; it’s much harder than learning the Latin, by a long shot. Father Lanshee must be reading my mind.
‘There’s got to be a devil in you, boy. That’s what really did it and we’re going to pull him right on out. What have you been doing lately which could let a devil take hold of you?’
He’s waiting for me to answer. I think of all the things I’ve done that might be devil’s work but the only thing that comes out is about Mr Harding.
‘Father, this summer there was a dead man, a dead man who killed himself in his garage. I was the one who found him. I was thinking about that when I was supposed to be studying my Catechism.’
Father Lanshee looks at me. He has the censer lit now and it’s smoking. He has the holy-water shaker in his other hand.
‘Yes, I heard about that. He wasn’t Catholic, was he?’
‘No, Father. He was just Mr Harding; I think he was a Protestant.’
‘There could easily have been devils around a place where a man knew such despair so as to take his own life. That could be it.’
He comes to the step just over me. I put down my head. The smell of incense makes me sneeze but I’m holding it in.
‘You pray hard, Kettleson. I’m going to chase that devil straight on out of you. You’ll feel better after you’ve been
exorcised.’
He’s praying loud now and swinging the censer over one of my shoulders then the other. He does this while I say eight Our Fathers, three Hail Marys and make an Act of Contrition. I’m just starting with a ‘Glory be’ when he begins sprinkling me with holy water and praying louder. I’m so scared, black clouds keep coming down over my eyes. I’m expecting a devil to float in smoke out of my mouth or split its way out of my chest or my back the way it is in holy pictures. But nothing happens.
Father Lanshee stops. He puts the censer and the holy water on the altar. Then he comes down, tucks his hand under my chin and lifts me up.
‘Let’s pray that did it. But first you must apologize to Sister Anastasia.’
He turns my head with his hand. She’s still kneeling at the altar rail, shining-eyed.
‘Do you think the devil’s been exorcised, Father?’
‘We can’t be sure, Sister. But he should apologize to you first.’
He leads me back down to the altar rail, where Sister Anastasia’s still kneeling. He pushes me down on my knees. She looks at me, glinting, her lips all pulled together, almost as if she’s trying to keep from smiling.
‘Well, what do you have to say for yourself, Kettleson?’
‘I’m sorry, Sister. I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what got into me.’
‘I think it must be the devil himself made you do a thing like that, Kettleson. If I were you I’d stay here in church and pray for the rest of the morning.’
Father Lanshee is standing slightly behind me.
‘That’s a fine idea, Sister. Also, I don’t think he should serve mass again until we’re certain he’s himself. What do you think of that, boy?’
‘Yes, Father.’
I’m supposed to serve at nine-o’clock mass that next Sunday. It’s the mass all the kids go to; they sit in the center aisles, girls on the left side, boys on the right, with the little kids up front and the eighth grade in back. My parents know I’m serving this mass and will be there. How can I ever tell them that? I don’t know how I can tell them how I’ve been exercised either. The trouble is, I don’t even feel tired; that devil’s got to be in there still.
Father Lanshee and Sister Anastasia leave me alone in the church all morning. I’m supposed to say five rosaries with all the mysteries, and when I’m finished, keep saying the ejaculation ‘My Jesus mercy – my Jesus mercy.’ Father Lanshee lends me his rosary. It’s small, black, wooden beads, and he kisses the crucifix on it before he gives it to me. When the lunch bell rings, I can go home.
Sister Anastasia doesn’t tell anybody, at least any of the kids, about my being exercised and I don’t tell anybody either, not even Laurel. She’s too little to understand. I keep hoping God knows I didn’t mean it; that’s all that counts. He must know about how I am with metal in my mouth; the sisters tell us God knows everything, even some things we don’t know ourselves. After school I give Father Lanshee back his rosary. I hope maybe he’ll let me back in the altar boys, at least let me serve that nine-o’clock mass, but he doesn’t say anything.
Sunday when I’m supposed to be serving, I sneak off to Mr Harding’s garage and that’s where I find the kittens.
There are all kinds of alley cats in our alleys and packs of dogs, too. The kids around our way are awful mean to the cats. They don’t do much against dogs because some of them bite. But the cats mostly only run away. I used to think alley cats had shorter legs than most cats but they only look short because they’re always crouched ready to spring away if you come near. They have little hollow places behind their heads and between the tops of their legs on the back when they’re hunched down like that. When a cat’s all set to spring there’s almost no way you can catch it.
But Billy O’Connell showed me how you can always catch a cat if you just keep running long enough. They’re fast but they get tired out soon. Maybe they don’t get enough to eat from eating only garbage. Sure enough, though, he’d keep running after a cat in the alley where they had no place to go and he’d run them down finally. Usually, at the end, the cat would run into an empty garage, where Billy’d shut the door and corner them.
What Billy O’Connell likes to do with cats is climb up on somebody’s porch, one of the old ones with the steps still on them, and throw the cat through the air. He throws them any which way, and they spin right around and land with their legs spread out, then run off. He tells me he threw one out his bedroom window and it was the same thing. He wants to throw one from a roof someday. O’Connell has the idea cats can practically fly. He’d like to throw one out from an airplane sometime to see what happens.
You have to be careful with these cats because they all have fleas. It’s the fleas Mom worries about more than the cats, it’s the same with frogs and warts.
Sometimes the kids’d catch two cats and tie them together by the tails. Those cats would swing around in circles yowling, pulling against each other. I never did anything like that myself but I’ve watched. There are some mean kids around our way, all right, but probably they’re the same everywhere.
One of the worst things they do is pour gasoline on a cat’s tail and then light it. A kid up on Radbourne Road was doing that and burned himself so bad he had to go to the hospital; he almost died and now he has shiny wrinkled scars on his arm so he can’t open his elbow all the way.
When you light a cat’s tail, it screams even worse than they do at night when they’re fighting and making babies, only there’s no purring or cat baby-crying mixed in, it’s all just yowling and screaming. Most times the cat dies and somebody will find it in the back corner of a garage or under a porch when it starts to stink. But I’ve seen a few live. Gradually the black burnt bones that are left fall off a piece at a time until there’s only a tiny stump of a tail left. Usually fur grows over this part so those cats look like a cross between a cat and a rabbit.
That Sunday, I go off as if I’m going to church. I’d been awake practically all night, trying to get up nerve to tell my folks I’ve been thrown off the altar boys. But I couldn’t do it. So instead I go over to Mr Harding’s garage. They’d moved all his furniture from his house and his wife drove his car away but they didn’t clean out the garage. There are boxes filled with old clothes and old blankets. Burlap bags, moldy cloths and clothes are strewn around. I don’t know why I went back. I’d only been back once since I found him; that was when Zigenfus told me the car had been taken out by Mrs Harding, and I wanted to check for sure.
When I walk into the garage, the first thing besides cargrease smell is the smell of molding rags. One of the garage windows has been broken already. Unless somebody else moves into the house soon, it won’t be long before they’ll all be broken. Kids, even some grownups, like breaking windows. There are some houses on our block with more broken windows than ones with glass in them. That’s one reason Mr Marsden let us stay in our house even when we couldn’t pay the rent; at least we keep it clean and painted; the windows aren’t all broken out.
Once I threw a stone and broke one of Mr Coughlin’s windows. He caught me and dragged me home. I was only about seven then. My dad told Mr Coughlin we’d get it fixed. He was mad but he didn’t holler or anything. But that Saturday he made me go over with a folding measure and write down the measurements of Mr Coughlin’s window. Then we walked to the hardware store, where they cut a piece of glass just that size. The glass and putty and some little nails cost thirty-two cents. Then we went over to Mr Coughlin’s house and fitted in that piece of glass. Dad didn’t say anything all this time but showed me how to do it, and after he nailed in the little nails, he made me put in all the putty. It’s really hard to do right. It took me two hours, doing it over and over again until I got it all smooth and even. When I was finished I was crying. Dad put the tools away, and took me by the hand and led me home.
‘Dickie, I just wanted you to know something. Any fool can break a window but very few people can put one back in.’
The second thing I smell is the smell of that gas Mr Harding killed himself with. That’s a smell that doesn’t go away fast. The door’s open so I let myself just inside. I’m afraid to go all the way into this garage. I don’t believe in ghosts, but Father Lanshee might be right about devils.
I’m standing there, thinking how Mr Harding looked and trying not to think about Mom and Dad looking for me on the altar, when I see something move in the back corner of the garage in the middle of a bunch of old clothes. I step sideways to get a better view and lean forward a few steps. There’s a green-eyed cat, eyes almost green as my mom’s, and shining there in that back corner.
She’s hunched the way cats get when they’re about ready to run. Her eyes stay on me without blinking and I’m looking to see if she’s hurt or anything. Lots of times cats get hit by cars then crawl into these garages to die. But she looks healthy, healthy that is for an alley cat.
I’m starting to back out the door when she dashes past me and scrambles up the inside of that garage door and out the broken window. I’d left the door open so there was no reason for her to go out that way.
She moves so fast she scares me and I push myself against the garage door that isn’t open. These garages have two doors that swing like regular doors; they don’t swing up the way they do in the movies.
I’m about ready to go out the door when I hear some sounds coming from where that cat was. I know right away what it is and I want to see them. I tiptoe back carefully and there, tucked in the cloth, are five baby kittens. They’re so small their eyes are still closed; they can’t stand up. I reach in and lift them one at a time. The mother was a striped tiger cat, standard alley-cat color, sort of greenish gray and black stripes. Two of these kittens look like that. Another is black and white, one is black, and the other is a brownish color with dim blackish stripes. This last one is strange because it doesn’t have a tail and it’s too young for anybody to have burnt it off. I’m not sure if the mother had a tail but I think she did. Maybe the father was one of those cats who got his tail burnt off and this kitten inherited it. It is dark brown as if it’s already been burnt. Maybe this one is a devil cat, come straight out from H-E-L-L.
After playing with the kittens for a while and listening to them, I decide to see if I can help them stay alive. Most of the kittens in these alleys get killed by dogs, boys or other cats. A lot of times there just isn’t enough to eat.
So, before everybody comes home, I go in, open the ice-box and take two pinches out of the hamburger in its brown paper. Mom is going to make meat loaf with it. I pat the meat back into shape so it looks the same. To make up, I’ll eat a little less myself; I don’t particularly like meat loaf much anyway. I pour milk into a cup without any handle I had in the cellar for my turtle before he disappeared. I take both these, a piece of broken broomstick, and some wire back to Mr Harding’s garage. I put the milk and the hamburger beside the kittens.
The mother cat isn’t there. I figure she’s out looking for something to eat.
I don’t have much time before everybody comes home, so I go out and push the broom handle through the latches on the door and wire it shut. This will keep other kids out, and so long as the only way to get in is through that window, no dog or anything can get at them. When I finish, I feel better; I feel almost as if I have a little family of my own. I’m ready to tell Mom and Dad about being thrown out of the altar boys.
It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Mom gets all excited at first but then settles down. Dad asks me to explain and I tell about the eraser and Mr Harding and the taste of the crucifix and my spitting, the exercising; the whole thing. It sounds even crazier when I’m saying it than it did when it was all happening. While I’m talking, my scrambled eggs and bacon are getting cold. We always have scrambled eggs and bacon on Sunday morning. It’s the only time we have bacon because it’s so expensive. We each get two slices.
‘And after that Father Lanshee threw you out of the altar boys, is that right?’
‘That’s right. I think he doesn’t want to take a chance of letting someone who might have a devil inside him get on the altar.’
That’s when Dad starts laughing and I know it’s going to be all right.
‘Don’t you worry, Dickie; you don’t have any devils in you. Don’t you worry about it.
‘You know, your grandfather, my father, has the same trouble with nails in his mouth. They’d get so wet they’d almost be rusty before he could drive them into the wood, and there would be a little puddle of spit around the top of each nail when it was pounded in.’
I stare at him, hoping he’ll go on. I love to hear stories about my grandfather.
‘You eat your egg and bacon now, Dickie. I guess there isn’t much chance of your going to communion anyhow. But you’d better get to that eleven-o’clock mass. It’s going to be a high mass and could last almost two hours. I guess that’ll pay off to God for you missing the nine-o’clock today.’
He pushes the last of his egg into his mouth, takes the final crust of his bread and scoops out his plate; pushes the bread into the side of his mouth.
‘One thing, Dickie. Don’t ever let anyone, I don’t care who it is, throw any erasers or anything at you again. You just walk out of there and when I come home, you tell me. I’ll take care of it. In fact I’m half tempted to go in and talk to that Sister Anastasia and Father Lanshee myself right now, but I’ve already got enough trouble to think about.’
Over the next week I go every day to see the kittens. I never see the mother again. The third day I go, there are only four kittens; the black-and-white one is gone. All that’s left is one ear, the little paws with tiny claws and most of the tail.
I figure a tomcat came in and ate it. Or maybe it could even be the mother. Jimmy Malony told me once how when cats are born in May the mother will eat them sometimes, but this is September. I can’t think of a way to keep tomcats out without keeping the mother away too.
I start sitting across the alley in the areaway to see if I can catch the mother going in or out so I’ll know she’s feeding them, but she must only go in at night or during the day, when I’m at school. Or maybe she sees me hiding across the way and won’t go in while I’m there.
Two days later, one of the striped cats is gone, all except two paws. The other kittens are starting to get their eyes open. This is the day Dad came home beaten up by goons the second time.
He’d had to work overtime and they were waiting for him. Luckily he had his monkey wrench because he broke away, ran, got on a trolley car, where they couldn’t get to him.
This time my mom is really crying. She wants Dad to stop being shop steward, to just do his job.
Dad’s white and his hands shake while he’s reading the newspaper. He keeps making knots in his jaw, tight, the way he does when he chews, but he isn’t eating.
I want to ask about the kittens disappearing and what I can do, but I’m afraid. He looks so strange. I don’t think of my father as somebody who gets scared, and it scares me seeing him this way.
It’s Thursday of the second week after I found my kittens, when I go in and there’s only one left, the little brown one without a tail. I watch all the weekend, even eating lunch out there in the alley, but I never do see the mother cat go through that broken window; no other cat climbs through either.
When I go in the garage he’s nuzzling in the mess at the bottom of the nest. By now, all the cloths are blood-soaked and there are pieces of kitten smashed into the cloth. As soon as that kitten sees me, he rears up on his hind legs and backs into the corner of the garage behind the nest. He’s standing up there with his claws out and his eyes fastened on me like a lion or a bear. I sit down on the garage floor in a part where there isn’t any grease and watch him. I also get to really look at him.
He’s definitely like a burnt tiger except for not having a tail. There are darker stripes coming down between his ears, across his forehead, and between his eyes. There are also stripes going out from each of his eyes, almost like a raccoon, and there are dark drips coming down from the inside of his eyes right next to his nose. I can’t tell for sure if these are real marks or only something like sleep that gets caught in the corner of your eyes.
His nose is pink on the end mostly but with some black parts on the top and outside. The bottom of his nose has a little slit in it to match his mouth and he has no lips. Whenever I move too fast, he opens his jaws wide and makes a hissing sound.
I keep calling this cat ‘him’ but I don’t really know. The kids in the neighborhood say it’s hard to tell a boy cat from a girl cat till they’re grown up; then it’s easy. The tomcats have big nuts and the females a round pink hole under the tail.
This one has little sharp white teeth and the inside of his mouth is pink in the front, the way you would expect, then it gets darker, almost blue or purple at the back of his tongue. When he opens his mouth to snarl, he tucks his tongue back away from his teeth; I never noticed that about cats before. But then I never really noticed much about cats; I don’t think I even really like cats. I know they eat rats and mice but they also catch all the pigeons and sparrows. There are practically no birds in the alleys, only at the front, and then it’s mostly starlings.
But I’m beginning to like this cat and I’m becoming more and more convinced he ate his brothers and sisters. I figure he’d wait till they were all asleep then kill one by biting it on the neck or something and draining the blood. Probably the other kittens, when they were still alive, helped him eat them, too. Four would eat one, then three ate one, then two ate one, then this one ate the last other kitten, the black one that’s only one paw and a tail now. It must have been awful to see. I wonder if they ate the meat and milk I brought or some other cat came in and ate it. I don’t know for sure whether it’s true he ate his brothers and sisters but I decide to name him Cannibal.
I sit there a long time, watching, not thinking much, and then he begins to fall down. He isn’t coming down on his four feet, he’s falling over sideways. He does this twice, then just lies there on his side, his thin stomach going in and out. His eyes are closed so I can sneak up on him. I wonder if I could pick him up now without getting bitten. Actually I’ve been too afraid to put my hand near him the last week, even though he isn’t much bigger than a mouse. He’s really like a miniature wildcat, not like a kitten at all, except he’s so tiny. I don’t think he’s actually grown much since the first time I saw him. Only he’s opened his eyes, learned to growl and stand up. I haven’t ever seen him walk. He just huddles in that bloody, messy nest or rears up in the corner behind it.
So, carefully, I put my hand under his tiny body and pick him up. He’s limp and doesn’t move. I see he’s unconscious and I get scared. I tuck him against my stomach and run out from the garage, up the alley to our place.
I go in the cellar and make a little bed for him with one of my dad’s clean paint rags, then sneak up the stairs. Mom must be upstairs in the bedrooms and I don’t see Laurel. I open the icebox and get some milk. I pour this from the bottle into the lid of a mayonnaise jar Mom has stored under the sink, then I add a bit of water to the milk bottle and put it back. I dash down into the cellar.’
He’s still breathing but sort of shudders at the end of each breath. His eyes are still closed.
There he was, standing up, trying to fight me, and dying right in front of my eyes. I hold him over the mayonnaise jar lid and try sticking his pink nose into the milk. He doesn’t open his mouth, doesn’t try to lick the milk. What happens is he breathes in some of it with his nostrils and sneezes. He shakes his head, sneezes again, but doesn’t brush off his face the way cats do.
Now he’s limp in my hand again. I keep trying but he’s too far gone to drink. He’s dying for sure. After all his struggle trying to stay alive, he’s going to die anyway.
I put him down on the cloth again and tuck him in behind the small bucket-a-day furnace so he’ll be warm. I hear Mom walking around upstairs. I go out the cellar door, run down the alley, up Copely Road, then along Clover Lane and into our house from the front. I come in as if I’ve been playing outside in the street with the other kids. Mom’s busy cleaning house so she doesn’t notice me much. I run upstairs quietly and go into our bathroom. What I need is there. It’s the only place I can think to find one. I used to have one in my chemistry set but it got broken.
I lift the Argyrol out of our medicine cabinet and unscrew the top. It has a rubber squeezer and an eye dropper that goes into the bottle. I put the Argyrol bottle back in the medicine cabinet and squeeze the rubber, washing the inside of the eye dropper, until it isn’t brown any more.
When I’m sure it’s clean. I dash downstairs, out the front door, around, through the alley, and back in the cellar door. I’m afraid the kitten’ll be dead by the time I get there; but if I go right through the house, past Mom, she’s liable to ask me what I’m doing, where I’m going, and I don’t want to tell any lies. If there really is a devil in me, he’d just love to have me lying to my parents, especially about a cannibal cat. That’s the first time I begin to think that this cat might be a devil himself. I read one time in a book about Halloween how witches’ cats had the devil in them. It’d explain a lot of things about this cat, Mr Harding, and me.
When I get there in the cellar, down on my knees, I pull Cannibal out from behind the bucket-a-day, half convinced he’ll be dead, but he’s still breathing. I hold him in my hand, fill the eye dropper with milk and start squeezing it into his mouth.
First I try putting the point of the eye dropper right in the center under that slit in his nose, but the milk only comes flowing out and gets his chin all wet. Then I figure how to slip the point into the side corner of his mouth and squeeze it slowly. I begin to feel him swallowing and it all goes in if I do it very carefully. I sit there for a long time, slowly dripping in milk while he swallows. He still doesn’t open his eyes. I slide him under the paint cloth and push the cloth back behind the bucket-a-day again. I’ve used all the milk.
I go upstairs directly this time. Mom is going shopping and tells me to watch Laurel till she gets back. Laurel’s jumping rope with some girls on the walk in front of our house. I tell Laurel to stay there till I come back.
This time I warm the milk in a pan, then go back into the cellar. It was hard getting the milk just warm enough and not too hot. I put a few drops of it on my tongue and it felt fine. I’m hoping old Cannibal is still alive.
When I slide him out, he opens his eyes at me but doesn’t try to get up. His eyes look almost as if they’ve been crying but it could be only all the milk I spilled on him. I try wiping him off, but it’s hard wiping off kitten fur, it’s so soft.
I pick him up without any trouble and begin putting some of the warm milk in his mouth the same way. This time he begins sucking on the end of the eye dropper and it goes fast. He drinks down that whole second batch in about five minutes. I run back upstairs again. Mom still isn’t home. I look out the front door while the new milk is heating. Laurel’s fine, still jumping rope across the street. I dash back into the kitchen, the milk’s too hot so I add some cold milk till it’s just right. I’m using so much milk now Mom’s going to notice. If I add any more water it won’t taste like milk.
I decide I’ll tell her I drank some. She’ll like that because she’s always trying to make me drink more milk to build strong bones and teeth, but I don’t like it much, unless it’s cold and with chocolate.
I drink a quarter glass so I won’t be lying and leave it unwashed in the kitchen sink as proof. I wash out the pan I’ve been cooking in and put it back into the pot-storage part of the stove.
In the cellar, when I reach in the back of the bucket-a-day for Cannibal, he takes a bite at my finger. I pull my hand away fast. He’s worked his way up onto his stomach, still not standing but staring out at me with his yellow-green eyes. He has his mouth open again. I put the milk down just in front of his nose and sit back to watch. It’s the same; he won’t drink while I’m there.
I run upstairs to check Laurel and see if Mom’s come home from shopping yet. It’s all O.K. When I come back down Cannibal hasn’t touched the milk.
I don’t know what to do. I try waving one hand in front of him and then reaching back to grab him with the other, but he’s too quick for that and I get another nip on the finger. He doesn’t reach out to scratch me, the way you’d expect; he takes quick snaps with those sharp teeth. Maybe Devil would be a better name than Cannibal. No, it’s like Dad said about me; there’s no devil in there. He only seems that way because there’s something I don’t understand.
Then I get another idea.
I go upstairs and pinch off a piece of hamburger again. Most of the meat we eat is hamburger, except on Sundays. Then we usually have chicken. I do the same thing, pinching off a few bits, packing it together again and closing the paper the way it was.
I run down the cellar steps. I’m beginning to feel guilty about stealing milk and meat; our family needs it. I’ll need to tell this in confession. I’ll make sure not to go to Father Lanshee; he’d recognize me for sure. I’ll go to Father Stevens or Father O’Shea. Father O’Shea never pays much attention to what you say anyway; he sort of half sleeps in there with a book, then always gives the same penance: five Hail Marys, five Our Fathers and a good Act of Contrition. He almost always slides the door shut before you’re half finished with the Act of Contrition. I’ll go to him.
There’s no problem with the meat. Soon as I put it on the cloth in front of Cannibal’s face, he starts gulping it down, chewing it back and forth the way a grown cat would do. He’s a Cannibal all right.
By the time he’s finished, he’s up on his front feet. It’s amazing how fast cats seem able to recover from almost anything. Everybody in our neighborhood, the kids that is, believe cats have nine lives. I’ve had some of the alley cats pointed out to me that everybody swears were killed by a car or something and there they are, alive.
I think it’s only because cats can live through almost anything that happens to them, then most people think a particular cat’s had another life.
The other thing everybody around here believes is if a black cat crosses your path you’ll have bad luck. Once, I watched Joe Hennessy, who’s a big guy and can beat up almost anybody at school, and does, lots of times, walk all the way around to Clinton Road when a black cat crossed in front of him. I wonder if Cannibal could be thought of as a black cat. Actually he’s dark brown but somebody could easily make a mistake and see him as black.
Now I have to figure where I can keep Cannibal. If he keeps improving the way he is, he’ll be wandering all over the cellar and he’s sure to start making cat noises, meowing or growling or yowling or maybe purring. He’ll also start making messes, the way cats always do. I still haven’t heard him make any noise except the hissing he made at me when he was dying on his feet; but he could start making noises if he gets better. My mom would die if she knew I had an alley cat in our cellar. I haven’t even thought about the flea part. I wonder if I already have fleas.
I rig up a place for Cannibal behind the big furnace. It’s almost impossible to see back there and the furnace gets so hot you can’t touch the sides so nobody’s going to sneak back there. We just started the furnace last week when it began getting colder and we bank it down at night.
Last year, Dad taught me how to bank down our furnace, getting it to burn slowly and not use up much coal. This was after I learned how to sieve out the clinkers. In the morning, it’s my job now, before school, to start up the furnace again. First, I shake down the ashes with a handle on the side, then I put in one shovelful of real coal. Over the top of that, I spread a half shovelful of my clinkers. That way it gets started fast and then slows down as it gets to the clinkers. Sometimes I think I might be sieving the same clinkers over and over, but there’s no way to know.
One thing I do know is I’ve got to tell my parents about Cannibal. I want to keep him if he lives through everything, but I can’t do it if they won’t let me. When you’re ten years old you can only do what your parents will let you.
I want to have an excuse to stay down in the cellar, so I decide to shine shoes even though it isn’t Saturday. My dad’s made a little portable shoebox you can sit on. It has a lid so when you open it, there’s a place to put a shoe on, with little twist things on each side that are adjustable to hold the shoe tight.
My dad made this box when he was fired from J.I. and couldn’t get any job, not even with the WPA. We were on relief but all we got was cornmeal, rice, and once some Spam. We ate an awful lot of cornmeal muffins.
Dad made this box and went down outside the train station at Sixty-ninth Street and sometimes at Sixty-third Street to shine shoes. He told me he never made more than two dollars any day and sometimes he’d only be able to charge a nickel a shine. There were a lot of other men trying to shine shoes around there, and sometimes they’d get into fights about customers. Sometimes the police would come down from the municipal building up the hill and chase them all away.
But then Dad got a job working with the WPA. He’d walk to a place past Sixty-ninth Street, up on Westchester Pike, where they were fixing the streets. He’d walk all the way there and all the way back. He used to cut out cardboard or wooden soles for his shoes and tie them on to save shoe leather, also to keep his feet warm. Dad told me it was the coldest winter he remembers. I was too young to know; all I remember is the blankets we got from relief. We called them Indian blankets, like Indian givers.
When I was seven, my dad showed me how to shine shoes. After that, shining shoes on Saturday for church Sunday morning was my job. Even when we were building porches, after we came in I’d do the shoes. Sometimes Dad would stay on to help me when he wasn’t too tired.
Laurel’s are easy. They’re Mary Janes, patent leather, and I just brush them off, then rub Vaseline in to make them shine. Mom’s are white and brown in summer. They’re hard; you have to whiten the white part and shine the brown part. Now it’s getting colder, she only wears brown shoes with high heels. I have to do the heel, too. I know it’s about time Dad put on new heels; the bottom part on her shoes, that is, because it’s beginning to wear along the edge of the side where I shine them.
Dad wears cordovan shoes with a straight-across tip. He’s had these same shoes more than four years I know of; I guess all the way from back when he worked for J.I. before. He wears an old beat-up pair for working. The leather’s all cracked and you can see his socks through the top, but the bottoms are perfect.
Dad repairs all our shoes. Part of his work bench is a regular shoemaker’s bench. He has the right glue and the tiny square nails. He’s always saving a piece of leather from some trash or other. He cuts the soles out of this leather with a real shoemaker’s curved knife. I love to watch him when he fixes shoes; it smells good, too. I know I’m never going to be a man like my father; I don’t think I care enough about things.
My shoes have sharkskin tips so the more you wear them, the more they’re supposed to shine, but I wear holes right through the sharkskin as if it was nothing. Even so, I have to shine the rest of the shoe.
I go upstairs and gather the shoes. I line them up on the cellar floor. The floor of our cellar is always a little bit wet, even with the furnace going in the winter. Dad says the floor sweats.
I open the shoebox. I peek over at Cannibal; he’s still asleep. I take out some Griffin’s shoe polish and the Vaseline. I take out the shoe brush and the cloth for spreading polish. I’ve tried some others but I like Griffin’s best. I like the song they sing on the radio, too. I sing it to myself, keeping half an eye on Cannibal while I work on the shoes.
The sun shines east
The sun shines west.
But Griffin’s polish
Shines the best.
Some folks are not particular
How they look around the feet.
If they wore shoes upon their head
They’d make sure they looked neat.
So keep your shoes shined
With Griffin’s all the time.
Griffin’s time is the time to shine.
When you hear that familiar chime:
Ding-dong-dong-ding.
It’s time to shine.
Everybody get set—
It’s time to shine.
I decide to tell Laurel. I show her Cannibal behind the furnace; this is before Mom gets home from shopping. Laurel wants to keep Cannibal as much as I do but she’s sure Mom and Dad won’t let me. She wants to hold Cannibal but I tell her he’s still too sick. Actually, I’m afraid he might eat off one of her fingers. Laurel’s a very nice person even though she’s only six. She’s my best friend.
That night at dinner, before we finish dessert, when Dad is starting his coffee and Mom is coming in from the kitchen with her tea, I decide it’s the time. Usually if we want, now, we can get up from the table and go out to play.
‘Mom, Dad, I have something to ask.’
I look over at Laurel. She’s playing with her fruit cocktail, fishing out the cherries. She saves them for me. Dad looks at me over his cup, eyes gray, tired; he blows so the steam flashes out from his face the way I thought that devil was going to come out of my mouth.
‘O.K., Dickie, what is it this time? Have they thrown you out of the choir now?’
He smiles and I know he’s kidding. He looks over at Mom. She’s watching me. Mom’s better than Dad at knowing when something’s wrong. She always knows.
‘I have an alley cat in the cellar. Actually it’s only an alley kitten. It’s the smallest kitten I’ve ever seen.’
Dad takes a sip of his coffee. Mom puts the back of her hand against her mouth. I’m trying not to talk too fast. When I’m excited about something I talk so fast nobody can understand me.
I start by telling how I found the kittens in Mr Harding’s garage, the day I didn’t say mass. I tell how they’ve all disappeared except for one. I don’t tell about how I think Cannibal ate his brothers and sisters. I don’t even tell them his name is Cannibal.
I tell about how this kitten was dying and still trying to fight me off, standing in the corner with his paws up and his mouth open. I tell how I took him home and tried to feed him and now I have him behind the furnace to keep warm.
I stop and look at both their faces and try not to cry. Nobody says anything. Dad takes another sip of his coffee. Mom pours more tea in her cup.
‘You’re probably covered with fleas, Dickie. If we have to shave your head and sprinkle you with flea powder you won’t be so happy about that.’
She says it but she isn’t mad. She’s even smiling at me and I don’t quite understand. Dad puts his cup down, wipes his mouth with a paper napkin.
‘O.K., let’s go see this tiger cat of yours. He could already be dead. From what you say, I don’t know how you can keep him alive.’
We go downstairs into the cellar. I go first with Dad behind me, then Laurel and Mom. I reach carefully behind the furnace and Cannibal is asleep but he’s still alive. I slide out the cloth with him on it before he knows too much what’s happening.
I still haven’t told about stealing the milk and hamburger. I’m feeling once they see Cannibal it will be easier. When I get him out from behind the furnace, he rolls onto his stomach, looks at all of us, then rears up into his bear-lion position ready to fight our whole crowd. He looks even tinier than I remember. He’s rocking back and forth the way he did before and I’m afraid he’s going to fall over. Dad gets down squatting beside me.
‘My goodness, Dickie, I think you’ve got yourself a miniature tiger or a lion here, all right.’
He puts out his finger and Cannibal strikes out at it with his pointy teeth. Dad just lets him bite and pulls him out of the paint rag by his teeth and holds him in his other hand. Dad’s hands are so hard with calluses, cuts and bruises, he doesn’t seem to even notice a little kitten biting him.
‘You’re a fierce little fellow, aren’t you there? Dickie, this is the smallest living cat I’ve ever seen. He must be some kind of runt in that litter.’
‘He’s the only one who stayed alive, Dad, even if he is a runt. I’ve never met anybody who wants to stay alive so much. I think he might have some kind of little devil in him.’
‘Does he or it have a name yet?’
‘Cannibal.’
He looks at me quickly, smiles, looks up at Mom.
Dad runs his other finger over Cannibal’s head while Cannibal holds with his little teeth on to Dad’s finger desperately, feebly; rocking his head back and forth, sinking his teeth deeper into that hard flesh. I turn around to look at Mom. She’s standing with her arm around Laurel in our dark cellar and only one bare light bulb up in the rafters.
‘Can I keep him, Mom, please? I’ll do anything you say.’
She’s looking at the top of the Argyrol bottle and the lid to the mayonnaise jar beside the paint cloth; I forgot all about them.
‘I’m sorry, Mom. I took some milk and even some little pinches of hamburger. He was starving to death and you weren’t home to ask.’
I’m lying with the second part. The devil in me made me do that. But I’m wanting so much for her to let me keep Cannibal, not to get excited and start saying no before she can think too much about it. She stoops down beside Dad. She touches the back of Cannibal lightly as if she’s afraid fleas will climb up her arm.
‘Why, Dick, this cat doesn’t have a tail. It doesn’t look like a cat at all.’
‘Dearest, I’m not even sure it is a cat. Have you ever seen anything so tiny? And look at this color. I’ve never seen a cat this color, have you?’
And that’s the way it happened. That’s the way I got to keep Cannibal. Mom insisted I buy flea powder and rub it into the fur. Dad said I could get some cat food and he’d take it out of my ‘salary’ when we started building porches again. He turned to Mom.
‘This is one of the things we can afford now I’m back working with J.I. But, Dickie, I have to tell you, I don’t think this tiny thing can live very long. Be prepared for him to die.’
The rule is Cannibal must stay in the cellar and under no circumstances come upstairs. When he makes messes I’m to clean them up. The first time Mom smells cat in the cellar, out Cannibal goes with the other alley cats in the alley. Dad says he’ll make a sandbox; he tells me where there’s some sand at a construction site on the other side of Long Lane.
I’m so happy I can keep him I have a hard time remembering all the things I’m supposed to do and not do. Dad passes Cannibal into Laurel’s hand and works his finger out of Cannibal’s mouth. Cannibal looks up into Laurel’s eyes and I’m afraid he’s going to spring for her jugular vein. But he sits quietly there, crouching, ready to spring. If he springs he’ll only fall off onto the cellar floor. I guess he has that figured out already because he doesn’t do anything, only keeps his eyes open, shifting from side to side and hissing if one of us makes any kind of fast move.
Dad and Mom go back upstairs. Laurel and I stay down with Cannibal. I know we’ll have great times playing with him. I only hope Dad isn’t right and that Cannibal will live. I know if there’s anything I can do to keep him alive, I will.

PART TWO
Sture Modig was born in 1896 to Swedish immigrant parents on a 320-acre dairy farm in Wisconsin. His parents had worked fifteen years as domestics and saved $2,000, with which they’d bought their farmland. The land cost $20,000. They took a $10,000 first mortgage and an $8,000 second.
They soon had a team of horses, three brood sows and forty milking cows. They were living in a waterless, toiletless frame house when Sture was born. Sture’s father had first built the barn for his animals while he lived with his bride in a combination hut-tent. Then he built the house so they could have children before it was too late.
Sture’s parents had married in their mid-thirties after the long thrifty years in service. Sture was born when his mother was forty. She almost died in childbirth, so he was an only child.
Sture was the sole luxury in his parents’ lives, and from the beginning it was apparent he was truly an exceptional person.
Sture Modig was one of those few people who live up to their names. Modig in Swedish means ‘brave’, and if there is one word to describe Sture both as child and man it’s ‘brave’; he did not seem subject to the normal fears with which all of us are assailed. He was also ‘brave’ in the German sense of the word, brav, that is: well-behaved, willing.
Sture walked unaided at nine months and seemed to have an unnatural ability for converting sound into language. He was speaking words at eighteen months and could converse clearly at two years. Soon, he could also imitate, and seem to converse with, most of the animals around which he lived.
At four, he could settle a frisky calf or cow using only sounds he made with his mouth. He spoke with the barn cats and the farmhouse dog; with the pigs. He could imitate the sounds and call to him most birds, including domestic chickens and ducks.
Sture liked helping his parents. By five he was helping with household tasks such as dusting, sweeping, straightening; hauling water from the well. He was so small he carried the water in a quart milk pail. He’d go the fifty yards to the well four times as often as his mother, but in the end he’d fill the large water container in the kitchen.
At first, his mother allowed Sture to help only to keep the child busy, but soon realized his value. He was a consistent, quiet worker and his ‘play’ seemed to be what everyone else would consider drudgery.
Already, at that young age, Sture wanted to be of some good. It might be claimed this was because his parents were older and they doted on him, spoiled him in some way, expected too much of him; but it became more apparent with time this was not the case.
Sture was somehow unique in our world. His failing might have been that he didn’t know how to express love. He admired, respected his parents, but he was never overtly affectionate. This could come from the traditional Scandinavian impassiveness: neither of his parents easily expressed their feelings, either.
It could also come from their years of servitude. They transferred their servile allegiance to their animals and even more so to Sture. He grew up feeling a guilt for the service, the love, the admiration he received, the joy they took in him. He reciprocated, in a sense, defended himself, by serving them, devotedly, to the best of his ability. It was a battle of goodness, of kindness, but there wasn’t really much of natural spontaneous love.
Sture learned to milk a cow before he was seven. His small hands could just get around an extended teat but his strength, his will, and his communion with animals more than made up for this minor deficiency. The cows seemed to give him the milk. Sture could get more milk from a cow than his father or mother. At first, Sture’s father let him work around the barn with the animals only to give him something to do, but he, too, became increasingly dependent upon him.
Nothing was too hard, too dirty, too monotonous for Sture. He mucked out the pigpens with a miniature shovel, singing. He broke up bales of hay and carried fodder down from the granary in the largest armfuls he could manage. And, all the time, he talked to the animals, seemed to keep up a running conversation with them.
By the time he was seven, both his parents were worried about Sture. He was too good; in some strange way he made them feel guilty. He was so happy all the time, so helpful, so willing. It wasn’t natural. He wasn’t in any way like a normal seven-year-old. But there was no one else to talk with about this problem; their farm was isolated and the nearest communities were French-speaking.
Mr and Mrs Modig spoke only English with Sture. They wanted him to be a real American, to have the advantages of a native born. However, they spoke Swedish between themselves. They thought of it as their private language.
Meanwhile, Sture learned to speak both Swedish and English; he spoke Swedish to his parents the way he spoke cow to the cows or dog to the dogs.
Even more amazing, his English was less accented than that of his parents. As a very young boy, he was already learning to read English on his own from the pictures in the catalogues his father tore up to be used in the outhouse. He learned how to read by himself because reading was not high on the scale of sensible skills in the eyes of his parents.
Sture didn’t go to school until he was eight years old. By that time, he was doing about half the chores around the house: wood hauling, chopping, water carrying, sweeping, scrubbing floors. He was the first out of bed every day, starting a fire in the kitchen range or the pot-bellied stove in the sitting room. After this, he’d go out to the barn and join his father in the milking and other animal chores.
At calving time he’d often sneak away in the night to check that everything was all right. Twice he saved the lives of valuable milking cows in birthing by ‘knowing’ something was wrong even before his father was aware of it. The animals confided in him and he could ‘read’ their every movement as well as interpret their sounds.
His parents were glad when it came time for Sture to go off for school. They were concerned about his ‘unnaturalness’. At the same time, they were sorry to lose him, not to have his cheerful smile, his singing, talking to the animals, and especially his continual helping hand. The day he dressed for school the first time, wearing his only pair of shoes, his father spoke to him.
‘Sture, I know you’ll be a good boy at school.’
Sture nodded his head and smiled. It never occurred to him to be anything else; he could probably not even conceive of an alternative, but he listened.
Among other things, Sture was a good listener. He listened to everything and everybody. He listened to the grasses blowing, the insects buzzing. He could lie in a field and listen to the different sounds and tell without looking whether there were gnats, fleas, beetles, crickets, ants or grasshoppers chewing the grass beside him, flies, wasps or bees buzzing around his head.
He listened to anyone as if he really wanted to hear what was said. When he listened, one knew he not only heard the words said but understood their meaning and the feelings behind them. One felt Sture also heard a person’s voice as a thing separate, a personal music, not even heard by the speaker, but heard by Sture when he listened.
Sture’s dad continued: ‘I know you can already read better than your mother or I, but don’t ‘stick out’ in the class. Everything is so easy for you the other children might be jealous and treat you mean. You understand?’
Of course Sture understood; he also understood all the things his father was not saying, all his father’s fears and his pride.
‘Father, I shall be good. I want to know everything. I know I will be happy in school and I want everybody else happy, too.’
So Sture went off. As soon as he was over the first hill, out of sight from the house, he took off his shoes and shirt. He wrapped them carefully and started to run. It was five miles to the school and Sture ran the entire way. Sture liked to run; it made him feel close to the other animals. Because there was so much to be done on the farm, he never had enough time to run, but now was his chance for running: to and from school every day. He’d taken off his shirt and shoes so he wouldn’t scuff his shoes or soil his shirt.
Before he reached school, Sture put on his shirt and shoes. He went inside and sat in a chair with the other young children and listened. It was a one-room schoolhouse and some of the students in front were as old as seventeen or eighteen.
The teacher was a local girl who had gone to the high school in Manawa. She was nineteen and not especially intelligent or well trained, but she was kind. She was teaching until the man she wanted to marry could find his own piece of land to farm.
At first, she did not notice the new little tow-headed boy in back. She was busy trying to manage some of the older children. She gave Sture a primer to look at because there were pictures. She also gave Sture and the two other children about his age each a piece of paper and a pencil.
‘See if you can draw a picture from this book. Can you make your drawings pretty as these?’
She smiled. Sture smiled his disarming smile back at her. At first he did not know what she meant ‘to draw a picture’. He knew what it was to ‘draw water’, or for a horse to ‘draw’ a cart or to ‘draw’ a breath, or how to ‘draw’ the small bow he’d made. He knew his father talked about the chimney ‘drawing’ but he didn’t know about ‘drawing a picture’.
He read through the simple primer several times and looked around to see the other young pupils working with their pencils and looking back and forth at the pictures in the book. Then he knew. Drawing was like making the sound of a cow by listening to the cow, only on paper, with a pencil.
Sture proceeded to make almost perfect drawings, one after another, of the pictures. Sture thought this was a wonderful idea. School was going to be even more fun than he thought. His drawings were actually superior to those in the book because most of the stories in the primer were about animals and so were the illustrations. Sture ‘drew’ upon his constant observations of the animals to ‘draw’ his pictures. The other little children soon saw what he was doing and stopped to watch. It was like magic the way Sture drew. He drew without hesitation as if there were some kind of invisible image already on the paper that he was tracing, copying.
When the teacher saw that the younger pupils weren’t working but only staring open-mouthed at Sture, she came back to see what he was doing.
So began the schooling of Sture Modig.
The teacher quickly discovered he could do, easily, almost any task in reading or reckoning she could set. He asked to borrow several books reserved for pupils in the twelve- to fifteen-year-old range, and she willingly, but with some trepidation, agreed. Sture ran home that afternoon, barefooted, barebacked, with the books wrapped, along with his shoes, inside the rough shirt his mother had made for him. The shirt didn’t get dirty because his shoes had scarcely touched the ground.
Sture immediately went out to help his father with the milking. He showed his parents the books he had been given, and since neither of them could read English well, they thought it was only natural and were glad that at last Sture was doing something normal just like any other child.
That evening after dinner, after helping his mother with the dishes, then helping his father sharpen posts for a new fence they were putting across one of the fields, Sture read his new books. He read each of them twice. One was about Ancient Greece and the conflict between Sparta and Athens. Sture was not sure with which side he felt the more sympathy. He liked the Athenians for their love of learning, but the austerity and efficiency of the Spartans appealed to him more.
The other book was an algebra book. The intricate beauty of the equations delighted him. It made him think of his feelings about how everything in nature seemed to fit.
At school, Sture quickly became assistant to the teacher. In reality, he became the teacher. He had natural patience and could help the students understand. He possessed a sixth sense for their individual minds, much like that he had for the cows and other animals.
Although he was always smiling and pleasant, even to the slowest of the students, some of the older boys became resentful. This was what Sture’s father had tried to warn him about. The warning was not very necessary.
When the older boys tried to gang up on Sture in the schoolyard, they learned something new about Sture Modig. First, he was truly modig, brave. None of them spoke Swedish and could therefore not know this. They found out how Sture, without seeming to try, smiling all the time, could dodge like a rabbit, butt like a goat, run like a deer. If cornered he could squirm like a snake, scratch like a cat and kick like a mule. There was no way to hurt this peculiar eight-year-old little blond boy. After a while they learned to leave him alone.
Then, in time, they joined the younger students in admiring and respecting him. It’s hard to hate or hurt anyone with a smile like the young Sture Modig’s. It radiated from him, let you know he saw you, knew you, felt for all your feelings.
In the classroom, before the year was out, Sture was helping even the oldest of the students. He seemed to have a special skill in finding the stumbling blocks to learning for each individual and making the problem clear.
Miss Henderson, his teacher, stayed on. Her beau had found a proper piece of land, had bought it, and was building a barn on it, but she decided to stay another year at the school, mostly to see what would happen with Sture. She decided she’d wait until her fiancé had built the house and it was furnished.
At home, Sture became more and more interested in mechanical things. He managed to rig a crude pump run by a simple windmill to bring water from the well up to the kitchen. He worked out a system of gate latches between fields that were easily opened by a man but could not be budged by a cow. Earlier, they had only used a piece of wire wrapped around the posts. This took time to unwind, open, then rewind.
In the barn, he built a primitive forge and began making simple utensils and tools for the farm. It was there he designed the plow that made it possible for him to do plowing despite his light weight.
The plow his father used was pulled by a horse or mule and was an ordinary plowshare cutting into the ground and turning it over on the moldboard. It was attached to a pair of handles. This plow took considerable strength and skill to manage. It had to be forced into the ground, using the animal’s strength to pull it through, and at the same time had to be kept straight. Sture had previously tried many times to plow so he could help his father with this most strenuous work, but it was impossible.
On his forge in the barn, he fashioned and tempered a new kind of blade. It was shaped like an upside-down T, a winged blade. The crossbar of the T was so angled it cut naturally into the earth by the pulling force of a mule or horse. Once down there, it tended to stay down and turned the earth up in two natural easy curls.
Sture then designed and carved plow handles, modeled on his father’s but to his own size and longer to give him more leverage.
When he attached this new plow to a mule, it worked perfectly. With a minimum of downward pressure he got the blade into the soil, then, leaning on the handles and with the help of the winged blade under the earth, he could keep it down and at the same time it had less tendency to tip or turn.
Sture’s father couldn’t believe his eyes when one Saturday morning he woke to find the upper part of the south pasture already plowed. Sture had wakened at three in the morning and gone out to plow so he could surprise his father with the new invention. Sture was twelve years old now, and though not particularly large, was very strong for his age.
Sture next enlarged and improved his windmill to generate electricity. None of the other farms outside Manawa had electricity. Sture pounded out his vanes on his tiny forge, then read
electricity manuals until he could wind a small electric generator with copper wire. It was enough to provide a dim, flickering light in the barn and in the kitchen. He gave this to his mother and father as a birthday gift to them on his own thirteenth birthday.
At about this time, Miss Henderson, Sture’s teacher, realized there was nothing more for Sture to learn from her. She applied for his admission to the high school, where she herself had gone, in Manawa, fifteen miles away. She included samples of his work and, despite his age, Sture was accepted.
It was a hard decision for Sture’s parents. They were so dependent upon him for everything, not only his incredible skills and willingness, his joy in work, but his light spirit. However, they knew it would be a terrible waste not to give Sture every opportunity to be part of the great American dream; he had to go to gymnasium, high school. It was something beyond their wildest imaginings for themselves.
Sture insisted he could go to the high school and not miss more than an hour’s work each day on the farm. His only request was for a bicycle. His parents couldn’t refuse this. The farm was so much more prosperous owing to his constant contribution and effort, they must afford it.
Sture walked the more than thirty miles to Oshkosh, on Lake Winnebago, where there would be a chance to buy a bicycle.
This is the year 1908, and in Oshkosh, Sture sees his first automobile. He chases it down the street just to hear it, see it, smell it. The miracle of its running by itself, without a cow, mule or horse pulling it, fascinates him. He’s heard about automobiles but never seen one.
He also finds a bicycle shop. He spends all the afternoon watching bicycles being repaired, seeing the various types, different kinds of tires, steering systems. The men who run the shop begin to be a bit annoyed by this young boy standing around, watching their every move.
One of them goes over to Sture.
‘Hey, you kid! What’re you hangin’ aroun’ here for? What d’ya want, anyhow? You’ve been moping outside this shop all day. This ain’t no circus, ya know.’
Sture smiles his all-caring smile at him. He’s tried to be careful but he knows that, just like any animal, a man, if he’s watched too long, too closely, will become skittish.
‘I would like to buy a bicycle but I want to look and see what kinds there are to buy.’
‘You know we’re not giving them away, young fella. These bicycles cost a lot of money.’
‘Yes, I know. But I think I can pay. I only want to learn about them before I buy.’
‘You see that bicycle there?’
The man points to a black two-wheel, wheels-same-size, chain-driven-rear-wheel, pneumatic-tire bike leaning against the wall. It isn’t new but has been recently repaired and refurbished.
‘That there bicycle costs twelve dollars. You wanna buy it, kid?’
Sture walks over to the bicycle and looks carefully at the machine. He fingers the chain, pushes on the rubber of the tires, takes hold of the handlebars and shakes to check the rigidity of the frame.
The man has gotten the attention of his fellow workers. It’s late summer and they’re mostly in sleeveless undershirts, stained with sweat and grease. He nods his head and winks at the other workers.
‘But, kid, if you got the cash, I think we could let you have that there bicycle for only eleven dollars and fifty cents!’
The man is convinced the boy only wants to hang around as so many boys do.
Sture is examining that bicycle as if it’s a cow or a sick calf. With his fingers he’s running all over it, checking the bolted and welded joints, sighting down the length of it for any torque or warp.
‘May I try riding this bicycle?’
‘You know how to ride one, young fella?’
‘No, but I need it for riding to school.’
Now all the workers are watching. This is going to be fun, something to break the monotony of their hard days.
‘Look, kid. If you can ride that bike outta here and down the street without falling off, I’ll sell it to you for only ten dollars.’
He looks back over his shoulder at the other workers. They’ve all stopped working. They stand with their hands on their hips or holding tools. One straddles the bicycle on which he’s working, lifts the cap from his bald head.
Sture rolls the bike by hand outside the shop. The men follow him out to watch. Sture has studied the machine carefully enough to know that in order to get it going and moving, he must start it rolling as fast as possible, as soon as possible, or it will tilt over. He also sees it has no brakes. No bicycles at that time had effective brakes. The only way to stop was to jump off or run your hand against the wheel. The trick was to somehow avoid the rapidly turning pedals. There were no free-turning wheels, no hand brakes, no coaster brakes.
Sture checks to see if his legs are long enough to reach the ground when he’s straddled the center support bar. They aren’t. The only way he can stop the bicycle will be to vault off, holding on to the handlebars and pulling the bicycle up on its back wheel. Sture has ridden many a cow in from the field and performed essentially the same kind of jump, so he’s not afraid.
He works the pedal into position and pushes off. After a few yards of wobbling he’s on his way down the street. His strong legs, incredible agility and astounding sense of balance make it easy for him. He might have been the youngest person in Oshkosh to ride a bicycle. Bicycles at that time were for adults, definitely not toys for young boys.
Sture has some difficulty turning at the end of the street but learns to tilt his body in the direction of the turn and masters it. He starts pumping hard up the slight hill back to the shop. All the shop men are out in the street watching him. They’re ready to catch him when he tries to stop. But Sture does his quick leap off one side of the bike, holding the handlebars tight so the bike rears up like a horse when its bridle is pulled back hard.
There’s a moment’s silence, then the shop men break out in applause. The head of the shop comes over and tousles Sture’s head.
‘You’re really a wise guy there, ain’t you, buddy. I was fooled sure enough and thought you didn’t know from nothin’ about a bicycle, but you must work in some circus or somethin’. I never seed nobody get off a fast bike that way; I was sure you was gonna break your fool neck.’

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