The Maid's Version (10 page)

Unmothered for now and alone, John Paul would not allow himself to slide from school and sink beneath his struggles, but attended almost every day. Classrooms and study meant escape as his coltish mind was sent wandering the world by books and sharp teachers, and that wandering was in those days his chief pleasure and the classroom his place of fullest relief. John Paul enjoyed lining up to fight at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, exploring the woods of America with Lewis and Clark, traipsing beside a belled brown cow through fragrant meadows high in the Swiss Alps, or following candlelight flickers along secret cobwebbed passageways found underneath all great castles and foreign cities.

Closely after John Paul turned ten, Mr. Clellon was dropped by a gigantic pain in his chest and buried in rain. The dug earth graveside diminished in the deluge and leaked downhill as the preacher from his wife’s church spoke, the piled dirt lessening as mud with each word, so the service was abrupt and the shoveling started early. John Paul watched Mr. Clellon disappear beneath shoveled glop and felt hated by the sky and trees and rain. He owed some big shot somebody from an earlier life, he guessed, or he’d eaten a biscuit sitting in the outhouse and thus fed and nourished the Devil and God saw him chewing and won’t let it go. He’d done something worth punishing, that was proved by ever-mounting evidence, but…

John Paul kept four dollars and seventy-three cents in a drawstring Bull Durham tobacco sack and had no place indoors to sleep. His various jobs provided him with one dollar and sixty-five cents a week, out of which he paid for Alma, lightly fed himself, mostly lemon drop candy and raisin bread, and tried to save at least twenty cents. He wandered the town by night, sometimes slept beside the old shack now boarded tight and abandoned or under the loading dock behind the Scroll Building. He stood at the back entrance of the Two-Way Café or the Stockman’s or Dr. Bach’s Pharmacy and Soda Fountain for handouts and did at times receive edible offerings from each. He was one evening near the train depot tackled by a pair of men wearing those drab wool jackets issued by the CCC, who took the Bull Durham sack from his hands, then tossed him over a wooden fence when he followed them yelling. He received in that skirmish a gash that angled through his left eyebrow and gave him a scar some ladies later said added just enough intrigue to his looks.

He took to raiding gardens in full darkness, and no summer meal was sweeter than one so gained fresh from warm dirt and still alive in the mouth. A favorite patch to plunder, easy as butter, and not far from the square, was a very large and immaculate garden and clutch of fruit trees maintained by a comically mustached old man called the Rooshian. He spoke greenhorn English with a slow suspenseful drag as he searched for the proper shaping to give words he’d already started to speak. At times he would be heard declaiming loudly in gobbledygook about irksome concerns of some sort, to which only his wife could listen with comprehension. The Rooshian’s house at the north side of the garden was squat and cloaked in shadow by freely spread nature, vines sized thin to burly, with meshed tendrils and shoots, climbed over windows and up the walls to the roof, where tree limbs cluttered closely above and a skim of moss had settled on the shingles. He knew how to grow anything our climate and soil permitted and his crops were beautifully made beneath the sun and abundant.

The fence around this plenty was three rusty strands of barbed wire that had been stretched by several seasons of po’ boy raids and sagged deeply between tilted posts. Even a little kid could hop through at the sagged places. Even a little kid lugging tomatoes or corncobs could hop over running away. A little kid carrying too much might not hop high enough, though, and John Paul was hooked by a barb on the top strand and swung to hang upside down. The plunder fell away from him and he shrieked as the skin of his left calf slowly tore and lowered him by the shriek. His shrieks carried in the still night. The Rooshian came to his door and stood with a spot of lamplight glowing behind him while holding a fat book open with a finger inserted to mark his place.

He made a disagreeable noise and bent to light a lantern, then came into the yard following that light through the cultivated rows and rows of green things that had leaves and rustled and dirt that lay turned and soft underfoot. The moon was no help. He wore bib overalls without a shirt and bent to John Paul at the far fence line and held the lamp close. A patch of flesh was coming off the boy’s leg and had only a thin attachment to one rusty barb remaining.

“Don’t you now move, huh? Fence push in still.” He reached near the tearing yet snagged flesh and suddenly grabbed the sliver of skin and pinched the boy clear. A shriek, more blood. “Best hurt fast that way, boy.”

John Paul in lantern light did see a white wad of himself stuck to barbed wire and the sight of his own meat hanging there doubled the pain. (Baby brother and me, when rug rats, sat at Dad’s feet often to play our fingers across the irregularly shaped but smooth expanse that never grew skin to ooh and ahh over the creepy silken feel and make him repeat the story.) He was carried inside and eased onto a kitchen chair. The wife clucked and shook her head and went to work on the blood and the wound. John Paul in a strange kitchen of strange smells watched the bandage take on his own splashed color.

The Rooshian was Venyamin Alekseyevich Cherenko. (Dad misunderstood the Russian naming tradition and thought the big whoop was the patronymic in the middle and tagged me at birth with Alekseyevich. Mom argued and argued that carrying such a name during the Cold War would be a great burden, but the name became mine and I’ve never wished for another.) His wife was Masha, small and light, and from the first she seemed pleased to tend John Paul and renewed by his presence.

Mr. Cherenko said that night, “This garden for me and the woman to eat, yes? Yes? But we don’t wish hunger on none, boy. Hunger not mischief, we feed. Hunger you got, boy. Not mischief. We wish hunger on none.”

John Paul was fed heavy dark bread and a soured sort of soup that was then exotic and challenging to him but would become a favorite, and carried to a back room, laid in a small brass bed with the shape of another relaxed into the mattress. Cherenko stood over the wounded boy and opened his arms to indicate the space. “Our son lived. War came, he goes, there’s cross stuck in dirt over somewhere don’t mean to us nothing. Settle here, boy, to sleep. Go goodnight.”

And from that moment John Paul, with no real discussion of the matter or concern about legalities, did stay with the Cherenkos as a replacement son, lived with them for years until his own war arrived and called him abroad, staying on there even after Alma was in 1938 deemed well enough to be hired away from the Work Farm by July Teague, and came back into the neighborhood of his life.

M
ae Poltz and her children were run from town within weeks of the blast when Freddy’s true name and past became known. A city boy called Plug who’d served Egan’s Rats and rented the building had to be somehow involved, that’s the sort of senseless devilment men like him were wont to amuse themselves with when uncaged, but his wife kept her lip buttoned and couldn’t be coaxed to repeat the rhyme nor reason of the horror and make a clean breast of it. She claimed ignorance, and never wavered from her claim, but that much ignorance of the man she’d married and shared her midnights with had to be willful, just had to be, nothing else rang true, and she and her toddler brood were escorted to the train depot on a day of bleating weather and given tickets to a whistle-stop in central Kansas.

“If ever you think about coming back—think on it some more and don’t.”

When the Second Citizens’ Commission Inquiry was called (after months of agitation from motivated pests named Dr. and Mrs. Mark Shelton, Haven McCandless, Bud and Frieda Johnston, Ted Steinkuhler, July Powell Teague, and Alma DeGeer Dunahew) and scheduled for December ninth of 1941 (never held, never rescheduled) in order to deal with long-dormant but revived anger concerning still-unanswered questions and haunting rumors of provable guilt that were again reaching critical mass, Mae (now Mae Claar) was found in Fort Collins, Colorado, and asked to return. Her response suggested the commission members were out of their cotton-picking minds if they thought she’d willingly return, but she added, “We all know who it was got seen running the wrong way that night. When she blew up, everybody in town who could run did run to the fire and help except this one tall man in a white shirt and necktie, who when the sky got bright was seen by two housewives at the least and one maid and one old doctor jumping over fences and running real desperate through backyards going the exact opposite way from all the rest. Why is it we never have heard from him?”

The second summer after the blast, in the flat meadow across Howl Creek where the Skateboard Park is now, a Saturday baseball game was in progress in midafternoon, and one of the Heaton brothers hit a homer that rolled between distant saplings and down the bank into the creek bed. Two barefoot squirts on hand watching were sent to retrieve the ball and came back fast, without it.

“Where’s the ball?”

“Somebody’s down there.”

“So what?”

“His head is not on him right and he’s got his face stuck in the water.”

Both teams and all three spectators made quick time to the bluff above the creek for a look. Several voices said He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s got to be dead laying that way. A center fielder in his middle teens named Jack Gutermuth stepped to the brink, squinted downward and announced, “That’s that preacher.”

“Which preacher?”

“The one that said my uncle deserved to be roasted alive ’cause he could dance.”

“That’s him?”

“Yup.”

“Well, I reckon he’s in a red handcart to hell by now, about to get fried up good in his own grease—he’ll keep—it’s only the seventh inning.”

When Sheriff Adderly and Deputy Bob Jennings arrived postgame they shooed everybody back from the creek bank so they could study the situation closely. They wandered around on all sides of the body, squatted to their heels and turned the face up. One large whitish rock had left its outline impressed in mud short of the water’s edge and come to rest bloodstained and brain-spattered in a trickle near the body. The skull had been crushed and made almost triangular.

Deputy Jennings said, “There’s a word for what happened to that rock, there.”

“Lifted?”

“No, a better word.”

“Heaved?”

“Not that one, either.”

“Dislodged?”

“That’s it. That’s the one I like for this—dislodged.”

“So, the way you suss this scene—Preacher Willard stumbled over a root or something else up there, tumbled all accidental down to here and dislodged this big ol’ rock with his head?”

(Fifteen years later, Vance Bullington, who’d lost a boy and a girl at the Arbor, did on what he thought was his deathbed but wasn’t quite say to his surviving daughter, Billie, “That preacher with the big mouth? In nineteen and thirty-one? I’m who done for him.”

“I always have heard you most likely were who did that, Daddy.”

“You have?”

“So has everybody.”

“He was hunkered in the crick, there, catchin’ crawdads with ham fat on a string, and … I’ll take full credit for that killing now, I guess.”

“You already have the credit, Daddy, everywhere but in the newspapers.”

Billie added, “Daddy was a purty big gol-danged liar sometimes, told me he could fly airplanes backwards using hand mirrors and had once set up light housekeeping with Mata Hari over by Poplar Bluff ’til she got to boring him silly with her nosy questions, and a bunch of horsefeathers along those lines, so take his confession or leave it. I personally think this once Daddy spoke true. I kind of hope he did.”) “That’s how I read it, Sheriff. That there’s way too big of a rock to dislodge with your head, you know, and walk away after.”

“So it’s just that simple—Preacher tripped up there on somethin’ I don’t see and dislodged too big of a rock down here with his head.”

“And died.”

“Do I hear an amen?”

And there were the anniversary confessions. In the first decade after the conflagration perhaps a dozen complete or merely suggestive confessions were taken, all easily refuted, and the confessed would be returned to homes where relatives dealing with the Great Depression promised to watch over their lonesome addled kin and spend more time with them on Sundays if they could manage it, though it seemed nearly to blaspheme basic heavenly intentions to feed crazy folks when sane ones went about starving. Two of the more eager confessors were next-door neighbors who became perennials and their testimonies expanded in competition over the years into picaresque recitations of unforgivable guilt and delicious subplots of scurrilous intrigue everybody heard in detail one way or another, and plenty came to look forward to hearing yearly the advances delivered as both men tried anew to talk themselves into being hanged before the other. When one neighbor in 1937 drank raw milk too late and died, the other did sadly resign himself to not ever being hanged by others and gave up all confessing.

And there were the accusations and denunciations also delivered in clusters surrounding the anniversary date: Chuck always has liked fire too much to be left alone anyplace with matches but might have been on that day—I don’t got any way to know for a fact, I was at Jam Up Cave, myself, that night, but his eyes sure get wide seeing flames. Or: She and him had been stealing from the factory payroll, I’m pretty sure of that, since they had patent-leather shoes a little too rich and shiny for East Side, don’t you know, and ate hunks of beef meat when we had greens and fatback, so they likely did the bombing to throw attention away from their own wrongs until they could leave for California with the loot, which they did do within only a year or so. Or: My husband has been odd since maybe a week before then, could’ve been a month, and if I ask him since to do things around the house when he’s sitting in his chair, he won’t even look up at me but says in this deep scary voice suspicious kinds of stuff, like, If I put a dynamite bomb under the kitchen table maybe you’d leave me be a minute while I read this book, which is a horrible way…