Читать книгу Life & Other Passing Moments - Victor J. Banis - Страница 13

IN A SMALL TOWN

Eaton, Ohio, where I grew up, is an old town. It was begun in 1792 in an Ohio that was then the Wild West. It started with a fort, Fort Saint Clair.

The Fort has long since burned away but there is still the very pretty Fort Saint Clair Park just at the edge of town, with its wide green lawns (scene of annual civil war reenactments) and its all but unspoiled woods and meandering stream. There is the Whispering Oak as well, in which Chief Little Turtle of the Miami Tribe hid (according to legend, though history is less sure) to listen to the soldiers make their plans and so was able to massacre them later—which makes him, I suppose, the true forerunner of today’s gossip mavens who make a business of massacring people with collected whispers.

The town which soon grew up in the vicinity is lovely, too. Like all towns and cities these days it has suffered some from the relentless march of progress. A tornado some forty years ago destroyed the lovely old Victoria Opera House, which was then in use as the City Building. It was replaced with a hideous cement block architecture.

Though it was spared by the tornado, the splendid old Victorian library building—admittedly a monstrosity but a monstrosity of infinite fascination—was deemed too decrepit to be maintained and repaired (a fate I fear I shall face before too many years have passed by) and was torn down. In its stead is a perfectly harmless, and charmless, modern structure. I understand the benefits of its modernity but books seem to me to fit better in a Victorian structure, in much the same way that banking belongs to chunky, granite, Georgian styled buildings. I can never quite feel that my money is safe in a building made largely of glass.

Still, the wide, tree-lined streets remain and many Victorian houses and the Greek revival courthouse that occupies much of the central block downtown. Though the Seven Mile Tavern, which once graced its banks, was lost years ago to a fire, the Seven Mile Creek still follows its circuitous and beautiful path through the town. Where it widens below the Main Street Bridge the creek forms Crystal Lake, which is really not much more than a pond but a very pretty site nonetheless. In winter it freezes over and ice skaters add to its charm.

There is a covered bridge over the creek too, the Roberts bridge, the second oldest covered bridge in the United States and oldest of the nation’s six remaining double-barreled or shotgun bridges, which is to say it has two passages side by side.

When I was young there were a great number of these covered bridges on the roads around Eaton but most have gone, many of them burned. Farmers, the rumors say, who could not drive their enormous equipment through the narrow bridges and so were forced to go many miles around to get just across the creek. I cannot say for sure, but it would not surprise me if the rumors were true. Farmers are used to taking things down and starting them up again. But covered bridges, of course, do not grow on trees. Nor on cornstalks. Of the twenty-nine covered bridges that once graced the county, twenty-one have vanished.

The Sweet Shoppe, where we drank chocolate cokes (they seemed good then) and listened to Patsy Cline (who continues to seem plenty good to me), is gone, but you can still get fried mush for breakfast, which is better than it sounds, particularly on a cold winter’s morning, and a pork tenderloin sandwich the size of a Frisbee which, with a cup of coffee provides all four of the basic food groups—calories, cholesterol, grease, and caffeine—and is tasty to boot.

Just up the road is Greenville, which anyone knows who is familiar with Annie Get Your Gun (and if you’re not you should be; it’s splendid music) was the home of Annie Oakley. As a side note, Betty Hutton said that when she filmed the movie they soaked the local black walnuts in water and threw the water in her face to give her a dirty, woodsy stain—so besides being delicious, they were more versatile even than I thought, those walnuts.

Well to the east of Greenville is New Concord, Ohio. New Concord was the home of John Glenn. Glenn was rightly lionized as the first man in space. He also should have been horsewhipped for his part in the Keating Banking Scandal because a) he was a hero and b) he was a small town Ohio boy and so was taught better values than that, as any small town Ohio boy can tell you.

Yes, I know that sounds harsh but honestly now, if all those crooked bankers who were a part of that chicanery were stripped naked and forced to run a gauntlet of the investors (mostly older retirees) whom they swindled out of their life savings, don’t you think the entire banking industry would be better as a result?

It is not just bankers, either, who could benefit from a little old prairie justice. There is so much brouhaha these days about energy shortages. I can’t help but think that the board members of the utility companies and of their energy suppliers might be better for the occasional birch switch, administered by select customers (chosen, for the sake of fairness, by a lottery system). I would bet you every light bulb in China that we would soon have no energy shortage.

And while you are at it, if you emptied the rascals’ pockets you would likely find the very profits that they insist have been lost and which are almost certainly only misplaced.

* * * *

James Franciscus used to intone on television that “there are eight million stories in the Naked City.” With all due apologies to the Big Apple, if you want stories, the small town is the place to find them.

Sodom and Gomorrah were small towns, after all. How do I know that, you ask? Simple. It is not nose count that defines the small town but rather the one inescapable fact of life: everyone knows everyone else’s business. If you go back and read the Biblical story you will see that it was true in Sodom and it is no less true in Eaton, Ohio, nor ever was.

The history of Eaton comes complete with every sort of drama you could imagine and some you probably never thought of. Murders, scandals, incest, adultery, great love affairs, and heart-wrenching tragedy.

And Miss Ames. Miss Ames taught Social Studies—some history, some geography. Not very well, I’m afraid. She was a spinster, for reasons that I will get to in time, already old when I knew her and a bit frail. Her round face might have been cherubic but for the unfortunate fact of her whiskers. We laughed at those, particularly when, as sometimes happened, she would be unaware of the lint that had been caught in them. Children are cruel and I am afraid we lived up (or down) to that truism. It is a major step in growing up when you come to find that you are ashamed of the thoughtless hurt you inflicted on others when you were young. Some people never get to that regret. Some never even get to the awareness of it. Saddest of all, some never stop inflicting it.

Still, though we were sometimes cruel we were fond of the old dear in our childish fashion and tolerant of her foibles. Hers was a sad story in a romantic, Victorian way. Long years before, Miss Ames’ younger brother had vanished. Just disappeared, leaving behind a wife and daughter. And a sister, obviously. Some thought him dead. Others theorized that he had been a victim of amnesia or had been shanghaied in some foreign port. Or perhaps there had been some secret, shameful act that had made it impossible for him to face those who loved him. We knew only that he was gone.

I hardly knew the wife and daughter, and how they responded to this strange disappearance I cannot say. But all of us were aware of Miss Ames’ grief and her determination to solve the mystery.

It was for this reason that Miss Ames had never married, for her entire life had been devoted for several decades to searching for her brother. Her every penny, her every free hour, was spent in her search. She traveled often, following up any clue or hint, however tenuous, however distant. She read police reports, spent hours poring over old newspapers from throughout the country, even from foreign lands. An unidentified body, a wandering vagrant who could not remember his name, put her on a bus or a train, to New York, to Florida, to California. There were detectives, paid for with her scant earnings as a teacher. Phone calls, telegraphs, letters.

The years passed. The young, once pretty sister became an adult, the marriageable young woman became a spinster, the spinster an old, frail lady brushing lint from her whiskered chin and pretending not to hear her students snicker.

We watched her come and go. It was a romantic story, one of family devotion and untiring faith, doomed, it seemed, to have no end.

But end it did, though it was not Miss Ames’ tireless efforts that brought it to conclusion. Rather it was the sudden, astonishing return of her errant brother and the even more astonishing explanation for his long absence. There was, it seemed, no tragedy, no mystery, no thrilling saga to impart. He had simply gone off, following his own restless spirit, and never thought to get in touch nor to return until his wife was gone, his daughter grown, his sister near the end of a long, fruitless life.

She welcomed the prodigal home, of course. How could she not, while the whole town watched, and for a brief time they could be seen together, brother and sister, daughter sometimes as well, chatting in low voices as they sat on her porch or strolled the town’s streets in the twilight.

What did they speak of, one wondered? Did she berate him for his neglect? Did she speak in aggrieved tones of the trips, the search, the money and, oh, the years, the lost, long years, gone like the sunset fading into the darkening sky?

Did he regale her with tales of his adventures in distant lands, of long treks along dusty roads, of flights in balloons and flights of fancy, of villains and heroes and saints and great, great loves? Did they laugh together, cry together, argue, coax, plead, explain, pray?

She died not long after his return, perhaps bereft of her reason for living, and he drifted away once again, this time to be unmourned, unsought, undreamed of on long summer evenings.

Not a grand story, you understand, not the stuff of operas nor even of novels. In a big city, in New York or San Francisco or New Orleans, the years might have passed, the comings and going, all unnoticed, hers a lonely woman’s private pain.

It was a small town thing.

(Excerpted from Spine Intact, Some Creases)