Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (34 page)

In the next hour-and-a-half we made two bad turns that took us in the wrong direction. We had planned to leave north on Delaware Avenue, but somehow ended up headed south back toward downtown on another road. But finally, on a residential street, with our maps, I figured it out.

Patricia was brusque when she said, “So you really know where we’re at this time?”

Both of us were grumpy, and by her tone I knew my wife was at the boiling point. I thought I might lower the heat with a bit of humor. “Well, the last time I was here–”

Patricia exploded, “Don’t give me that ‘The last time you were here.’ shit! There’s nothing funny about this! Next you’ll tell me, ‘It’s just part of the adventure, baby.’ I don’t want to hear it!”

She whirled around and tromped back to the cart, climbed in, sat down and started pounding her feet on the floor as she screamed, “This fucking stinks!”

While I walked back to the cart, I expected a porch light to come on at one of the nearby houses–but none did. I was soft, but stern when I said, “Patricia, calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” Although she wasn’t screaming, my wife was still loud. “This is serious! We’re walking the streets of Buffalo in the middle of the night. We could get shot or mugged. Someone could rob us.”

I chuckled, “Rob us? The joke would be on them.”

She stamped the cart floor again. “Stop it!”

“No, you stop it! Throwing a fit isn’t going to help us at all.”

Had anyone been home at the residence we were in front of, surely they would have come to their windows when Patricia let loose with, “I’m venting!”

I grabbed her by the arm, and from deep within me growled the words “Patricia, shut up!” It felt like some monster inside was saying, “I don’t want to hear another word out of you! You’re going to get us arrested for disturbing the peace. Just sit there and keep your mouth shut!”

My wife was leaned back as far away from me as she could. Her eyes were huge with fear, and when I let go of her arm she scooted to the other side of the cab. I turned around and walked to Della’s head feeling very mean. I untied her lead rope from the street sign, looked into her mule face and whispered, “I’m not good at this.”

Aside from the clip-clopping of Della’s shoes, we continued through Buffalo’s nighttime streets in silence. Although Patricia’s presence loomed enormous behind me, I felt very much alone right then.

A few blocks later, a police car pulled in front of us and stopped with its blue lights flashing.
Oh God! Someone heard us fighting and called the cops
.”

The officer got out with a flashlight, which he shined all over us and the cart as he walked up to me. He was in his early forties, and had concern in his voice. “What are you doing?”

“We walked here from Arkansas and–”

He held up his hand. “I read the paper, I know what you’re doing. But why are you out on the street after dark?”

From the cart, Patricia yelled, “We need a place to camp.”

I said, “Can you think of some place where we could stop for the night.”

The cop stroked his chin. “That’s a new one. A campsite for a mule?”

From the radio fastened to his uniform, a female voice babbled a series of numbers. He tipped his head toward his left shoulder and rattled a bunch of numbers back to her. She said something else, which energized him. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll try to think of a place for you. But right now, I’ve got to move.”

A couple of blocks farther we came to a large field with a chain-link fence around it. It was a schoolyard, and ahead of us at the end of that
block was a monstrous five-story school building. In front of it was a lawn of at least two acres with several towering oaks. A winding drive led from Delaware Avenue to the back of the building. At the entrance to the drive was a sign: Mount Saint Mary’s Academy for Girls.

My wife, who went to Catholic schools, was suddenly giddy. “This is perfect.”

“If we can get permission.”

Although it was well after 8 p.m., there was still lots of activity around the building. A dozen cars passed us as we walked up the driveway and around to the back of the building. There, we found two school buses unloading a triumphant soccer team. So the parking lot was already effervescent. Then we pulled in, and the lot got chaotic.

A coach helped us get permission from the principal to camp on the grounds for the night. They also invited us to use their showers. The coach stood guard in the hall to make sure none of the girls walked in on us.

Unlike the boy’s showers I had experienced in public school–where everyone is in one big room–St. Mary’s had individual stalls, each with a small private changing area. Hot water had just begun to rain down on me when I had the thought, “This is every boy’s dream come true. Taking a shower with your sweetie in the girl’s locker room.” Then I thought, “Why aren’t I in the stall with Patricia?”

I turned off the water, and had just stepped into the changing area, when I recalled the ugliness between us an hour ago. My lust was suddenly overcome by despair. Never before had I grabbed a woman and yelled at her like that. Every fiber of me was racked with guilt as I wrapped a bath towel around me. When I pulled the wooden louvered door to her shower open, my wife jumped and gasped, “What?”

“I’m sorry.”

She was in the far corner of the shower stall with her arms crossed to hide her breasts. “Sorry for what?”

I felt like a little boy begging forgiveness. “I’m sorry I got rough with you.”

Cowering behind the shower she said, “I’ve never seen you like that. It scared me.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll never grab you like that again.”

Patricia uncrossed her arms and stepped from behind the shower as she said, “Well, I guess I really had it coming. I was kind of out of control, wasn’t I?”

“Even so, you don’t deserve to be man-handled like that. I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.”

I stepped into her changing area, pulled the door shut behind me and said, “Can we kiss and make up?”

It was as if the sun came from behind a cloud as she shuffled toward me. “Sure.”

I pulled the towel from around me, laid it on the bench and stepped into the shower as Patricia giggled. “Watch it buster! Looks like you’ve got more than kissing in mind.”

Although Mount St. Mary’s had several acres of schoolyard, they insisted that we camp beside the building near the back door. It’s the busiest entrance to the building, and our tent was about twenty feet from it.

The first people to show up in the morning were custodians. The first two arrived just before sunrise. While one of them fumbled with keys, I heard the other say, “What the hell is this all about?”

An hour later, teachers and students began to trickle in. Some students arrived on buses, others were chauffeured by parents. Then there were the lucky girls who drove their own cars to school–none of them clunkers.

Although Saint Mary’s was owned by the Catholic Church, it wasn’t just for Catholics, and the teachers weren’t nuns. That morning the principal told us, “We do have classes on religion, but it’s not the emphasis here
anymore. Our goal is quality education. We hire the best teachers we can find, regardless their faith.”

One of the teachers put it this way: “This is a moneymaker for the Catholic Church. It’s not cheap to send your kids here.” The same teacher told us about a scholarship program for welfare families. “If a girl really wants to go to school here and she works hard, and if her family is poor enough, she can get in.”

So, while the student body at Mount Saint Mary’s was all girls, they were from a wide variety of backgrounds. We saw faces of every race coming to school that Thursday morning. They had grades from preschool through high school, so girls of all ages were walking past our camp at the back door. Most of the younger ones were either awestruck or giggled all the way into the building. Many of the older ones just smiled and walked by, and there were some who asked questions. And then there were those who were too cool or self-important to notice. Most of them were the ones who drove themselves to school. They ignored us.

But all of the girls had one thing in common, they dressed alike. Mount Saint Mary’s uniform was a green plaid skirt with a white blouse. The hem of the skirt came to just above the knee, and they wore white knee-high socks with black shoes. From first grade up through the twelfth, all of the girls were dressed identically.

Kenneth handed me a Styrofoam coffee cup as he said, “When I taught in the public schools, I used to think uniforms were horrible.” He’d been teaching English at Saint Mary’s for five years. “I thought uniforms robbed them of their individuality–but I was wrong.”

“How’s that?”

“In any school, the big thing is who’s the coolest, and what they wear is a big part of that–especially with the girls. And a lot of the time that’s as far as they go toward creating an identity. But these girls don’t have that crutch. They have to dig deeper.”

A few minutes after the bell rang for classes to begin, three high school girls came out the back door. One was almost six feet tall, and she
said, “Our teacher told us to ask if we could interview you for our school newspaper.”

The girl with long blond hair asked the questions, while the shortest one took notes. She had a hard time holding the pad steady, so the tall girl bent over and put her hands on her knees. “Here, I’ll be the desk.”

After some giggling, the interview continued. At one point, the girl taking notes said, “Do you get tired of answering the same questions all the time?”

I had been asked that so many times, I had a standard reply. “Not really. Because the people asking them are all different, so that makes the questions different.”

However, near the end of the interview, one of them did ask me a question I had not heard before–and I wasn’t able to answer it.

It was the desk who said, “If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?”

New York became the Empire State by way of the Erie Canal. When it was completed in 1825, the three-hundred-sixty-three-mile waterway connected Lake Erie at Buffalo to the Hudson River in Albany. This gave the Great Lakes access to the Atlantic Ocean, and it firmly established New York City as the front door to America.

Farmers and loggers in central and western New York were the first to take advantage of this new access to the world. It was a cheap way to move a lot of goods. And it didn’t take the rest of America long to catch on. Ships sailed from as far away as Duluth, Minnesota, to offload products in Buffalo bound for New York City. Traffic was so heavy, that just ten years after it opened, the Erie Canal had to be widened and locks enlarged to accommodate the traffic.

We were near the canal, about five miles west of Lockport on Highway 31, when a man with his five-year-old grandson stopped and asked if he
could take our picture. He had seen us on the evening news a week earlier and just had to stop.

During our visit, I said, “People have treated us good here in the Empire State.”

The man shook his gray head. “It’s the rust state.”

“Huh?”

“You just walked through Buffalo, didn’t you? What did you see? I’ll tell ya. You saw lots of factories, all of them closed and rusting away.”

He was right. On our walk through Buffalo and the outlying communities, we saw several abandoned manufacturing plants, and the prevailing color was rust. In varying shades, it was on old water towers, dilapidated chain-link fences, and idle machinery that had been left behind. In some places this industrial decay was surrounded by cornfields, apple trees and other crops.

“Used to be, if you didn’t have a job it was because you didn’t want one. We had factories all through here. But now they’re gone and never coming back. Ain’t nothing around here now but farming.”

“Why did they shut down?”

“Unions, that’s why.” He was putting his camera in its case. “And I was a union man all my life.”

He’d worked for thirty years at a General Motors plant on the edge of Lockport. “In the old days, unions did lots of good. But now they exist just to keep themselves alive. My last few years on the job, they’d have us strike just to prove we needed them.”