Sweet William - short story

Sweet William and the Ryan Girls

While drowning one day, I remembered what a Chinese man, Huang Po, said in 600 BC: "As soon as the mouth is opened, evils spring forth." I'd swallowed a lot of water, and that may have inspired this odd recollection. Beyond this, though, I'm pretty sure Huang Po was referring, not to malodorous or deleterious microorganisms, but to deceptiveness in communications. If he was right, and I think he was, we humans can’t trust ourselves to tell serious stories sincerely. Our words, as a matter of course, of nature, carry elements toxic to the mind, the way software carries viruses that harm the thought process of computers. Being a wannabe preacher at one time, this insight put me out of business. I lost confidence that I knew what to say to help people save themselves.

My drowning took place near the village of Spring Lake in far north Wisconsin on an unusually warm sunny day in October. In a bog the size of a football field, in 4 feet of icy water, 9 of us workers were harvesting cranberries. We manipulated 10 foot long poles attached to wide flat boards to herd floating berries that had been released from parent bushes by a special thrashing machine (that looked like a tiny stern wheel paddler) so they'd float free in the flooded bog. I was an over-weight field hand of 46 at the time. I drank too much. My face was mottled and puffy. My given name was William, but everybody called me Bill. I was working harder than the others that day. I shivered from the sweat that ran from my soaked hair and neck down my front and back into my chest high rubber waders. My hands and legs trembled. I could barely see through the blur.

As I reached out to scoop up a few berries with my hand, to eat them, hoping the perfect sour taste of the berries and the ice cold water would ease the pain in my head and make my legs and arms work better, I stepped off the edge of the bog and into the 10 foot deep drainage ditch that ran around it. Water rushed over the top of my waders filling them almost instantly. Suddenly I weighed 100 pounds more than I'd weighed the moment before, and I began sinking down into the drainage ditch despite my desperate efforts to flail my way out. I wondered, in that odd slow motion way that’s common to people in crisis, why no one was noticing my nearly comic struggle for survival or coming to help me.

Water was beginning to choke me and I started losing consciousness. A mental movie, like ones that ran more or less constantly and almost imperceptibly behind my everyday thinking, began to play right over the top of my drowning scene. I became more aware of this movie than of my real life, and on some level, I didn't seem to care. Even as part of me continued to flap, flounder and grasp fervently for a purchase on the slippery bog bank, another part of me slowed and quieted, feeling a final rest approaching, I suspect.

My mind movie took me out of the bog. Suddenly, I was remembering when I was a little boy. I was called William, and people liked me. I saw myself pushing open the small town ice cream parlor's squeaky front door. The sound of its door bell tinkled in harmony with my pushing. Through the shifting glare on the door's large glass panel, I saw wiry old Margaret Ryan slip into view at the back of the store. I stepped in, walked past the penny candy on my left, and glanced at the old Rockola jukebox at the back. I noticed no one was sitting in any of the six birch stick booths on my right. I headed for the ice cream counter. It was mid-afternoon hot. I was 12.

I'd spent another aimless day at Grandma's. I'd taken the bucket out back, past raspberries and rain barrel, and hand-pumped icy well water for the kitchen. The kitchen was a lean-to added on to make a one room up and one room down into a three room house. The upstairs was eventually divided into two littler rooms, and a lean-to sun porch was added to provide a bit more space and privacy for my grandparents and their 4 daughters. I'd weeded the garden for a few minutes before the mosquitoes drove me back inside. Then I'd sat on the stairs to the bedroom smelling roses through the screen door and reading the Saturday Evening Posts - the cartoons and jokes mostly - that Grandma kept stacked on the open end of each stair. Despite the constant threat of attack by winged and crawly creatures, I'd done my duty, including emptying my slop jar in the gray, slightly listing outhouse that Grandpa had built long ago out between Grandma's hollyhocks and peonies.

I remembered my Grandpa exhaling a pungent white puff of cigar smoke and telling how he'd walk his pig down to the train station each evening to feed it scraps from the dining car on the Minneapolis Star, and how they’d cleaned the silverware on the diner one night, and put the waste from it in the food garbage, and how this killed the pig. I remembered Grandma slapping my face one time because I hit a bird with a stone.

I walked the two dusty blocks from Grandma's at the top of the hill, situated among the Catholic, Lutheran, and Methodist churches, past the Jack pine woods with the collar of ferns at its feet, to Margaret and Lucille's on the hillside, to savor what I missed of the city, the smell of hamburgers and the fresh feel of people who were not my family. I'd been taking this walk as often as I could every summer since I was very little. Now I was almost 5 feet tall, strong, handsome, with sound white teeth - my mother had had a dentist give me special experimental fluoride treatments for my teeth - and brown eyes with long lashes.

Margaret and Lucille Ryan's ice cream parlor lived alone in an old frame store front on Main Street. Margaret and Lucille lived upstairs. Main Street was two blocks long at then. Dickenson's General Store, the old bank building and White's garage shared the hillside part of the street with Margaret and Lucille's. The Standard gas station, bait shop, Stone Lake tavern, and Gross' grocery store clustered at the bottom of the hill alongside Highway 70 and the marsh. Over the years, Mr. Gross laid so many bundles of tied twigs alongside each other in the marsh, making paths he was, the marsh had almost disappeared and become a woods instead.

I walked across the ice cream parlor's faded red and blue paisley linoleum on a slow bee-line for the ice cream. As I approached, Margaret fidgeted a last drag on her Lucky Strike before she exhaled and shrilled amiably, "Well! How are you, William? Up to visit your grandma, are you?" As she spoke her head bobbed slightly, in all directions at once it seemed, and yet she managed to focus her darting blue eyes directly into mine, grinning as she did, and cackling sweetly. "So, William, how's your mother, hmmm?" Margaret asked this as she always did. I had no idea how my mother was. The question bewildered me. "She's fine," I answered as always. And, as always, Margaret accepted my answer without question.

I reviewed the full menu: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, tomato soup, chicken noodle soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, fried egg sandwiches, baked beans, sweet pickles, dill pickles, and potato chips. As always, I found it hard to choose. "Are you going to keep me standing here all day?" Margaret screeched while chuckling. I felt somehow comforted by her question, but I didn't answer. Instead, I glanced at the shiny Rockola again, turned, and wandered over to it. "Well I have dishes to do," Margaret wailed and clucked. "Let me know if you make up your mind."

I studied the juke box selections. I knew my mother was always arguing with her mother, with her daughter, and with her husband, too, my dad; but I had no idea what these arguments were about. Actually, I'd stopped listening to them. I paid attention mostly to my own experiences. I remembered the day when my best friends, Nancy and Cathy, pulled my pants down on the playground at recess. They laughed while doing it. I tried to laugh, too, and pretend it was funny. But it had felt horrible. My parents fought like animals, but I couldn’t imagine what it meant. I loved the cloak room next to my classroom at Our Lady of Peace. It was a dark womb that smelled somewhat of coats and shoes, a quiet private place where I could be alone.

After reading the selections on the Rockola, I picked Elvis Presley's Blue Suede Shoes, Louis Prima and Keely Smith's Hernando's Hideaway, and the Everly Brothers' Do You Want To Dance. This day, though, I decided to save my quarter instead of playing music. I turned away from the jukebox and stepped around the partition to where Margaret was washing dishes. I stood near her saying nothing. I looked at her jet black hair. I didn't guess it was black from dye. She sloshed the dishes and howled happily, "Haven't you figured out what you want yet, William?" Her awful voice pleased me, but I started to feel I might be taking longer to choose than I should. I didn't want to offend Margaret, dear Margaret. I could not imagine her being angry, or throwing things, or trying to strangle anyone. Margaret must have been younger than my Grandma, according to the things I'd heard, but her face was even more wrinkled, and her dresses more faded. "I'll be back in a while," I said in a low voice. "OK," Margaret shrieked warmly as she continued washing dishes.

I walked across dusty unpaved Main street to Dickenson's General Store. As I entered, I met Lucille. She clerked there. She was standing at the magazine stand. Her hair was gray. Her face was smooth and round and her hazel eyes actually twinkled. Compared to Margaret she was big and robust; her voice was slow and soft. And like Margaret, Lucille always smiled. "Well, hello," she said slowly. "Up visiting your grandma?" "Yes," I answered. Also like Margaret, Lucille always seemed peaceful inside. The Ryan girls, as they were called, never seemed to argue meanly or need to be right about things. They didn't seem at all like my parents or any of the other adults I knew. Once I heard Margaret remind my mom of a party she, Margaret and Lucille had gone to years before at the Green Lantern Tavern out by highway 27. A fire had started. The customers pulled the piano into the parking lot and kept dancing while the place burned down.

I browsed magazines at Dickenson's looking for those with drawings of sleek women with great conical breasts, garter belts, and skin tight evening gowns. Such striking women reminded me of my aunt Elaine, my mother's sister. This aunt Elaine had gone to college as a nurse and to war as a captain. After she got back, she told jokes about people's organs slipping out of them and onto the floor during operations, and of having to open plasma cans until their fingers bled. She had married a Southern man, a gnarly top sergeant named Hank. I took it as common knowledge that Southerners were less civil than Northerners, and more violent; indeed, this man my aunt married carried a pistol in his back pocket, and grinned even when there was no obvious reason for it. Hank once told about how he'd hidden inside a dead horse in order to shoot a sniper on a hot hellish island in the South Pacific.

My first exposure to adult sex was seeing Elaine and Hank writhing on the floor in the dark at Grandma's where visitors routinely slept on the living room floor. It was easy to see the living room from the top of the stairs. I watched them carefully, like I was hiding, patiently, intently, inside a dead horse, to get a glimpse of a sniper.

I couldn't linger long by the magazines at Dickenson's or my lustful nature, which I thought well hidden, might be un-secret-ed. So, I went out back and sat in the ice house, a graying wooden shed that held countless four foot cubes of winter ice all buried in ripe sawdust for insulation. It was a cool cloakroom. As I sat on the giant ice cubes, it came to me that, as far as I could tell, my mother had not done any dancing for a long time. It came to me that my father probably hadn't either. My father was always working back in Chicago where we lived, or he was at the corner bar, where he also seemed to live. It occurred to me that my father was incomprehensible to me.

My struggle in the water ended then. My body floated quietly in the flooded bog. Other workers saw what was happening and came to help - in the nick of time.