Serendipity Green Page 3

  She knows other facts as well: that fathers don’t always return home from the wars they fight; that mothers sometimes die in car accidents; that the aunts who take you in have fat, wonderful laps; that uncles, when their fat-lapped wives are away shopping, are not always as nice as they seem. In short, Katherine Hardihood discovered early in her life that facts about other things keep your mind off the facts about yourself.

  Her need for facts about other things drew her to the library. My, the facts in there! Billions of them. Gathered. Numbed. Alphabetized. Indexed. Chronologized. Footnoted. Explained. Defined. Put in plain English. Tantalizingly sprinkled into poetry. Churned into wonderful works of fiction. Scrupulously researched and worried over by others who love facts as much as she does.

  It is this love of facts that brought Katherine Hardihood so willingly to the Squaw Days Committee thirteen years before. It is this love of facts that keeps her on the committee now, fighting her relentless guerrilla war against those who do not.

  Squaw Days had been Donald Grinspoon’s idea—at least the idea of holding some kind of annual festival had been his idea. “The town’s drying up like a prune,” he told the handful of carefully-selected people gathered in his office one November night. He and fellow Republican Ronald Reagan had just won re-election to their respective jobs. “Tuttwyler Mills has been closed for a decade now, and nobody’s shown a lick of interest in taking over the snack cake plant. Two-thirds of the stores on the square are empty. Even some of the houses on South Mill are for sale. We need a shot in the arm.”

  D. William Aitchbone, then just one year out of law school, had an idea. “We need a Japanese auto plant.”

  Dick Mueller, serving his first stint as post commander of the VFW, rejected that idea immediately. “No we don’t.”

  D. William Aitchbone persisted. “They’re building plants all over the United States now. Why shouldn’t we get one? Think of the jobs!”

  That brought Dick Mueller straight out of his chair. “Think of Artie Brown, young man! He left his right foot on Guadalcanal.”

  That ended any further discussion of luring a Japanese auto plant to Tuttwyler.

  “There’s no way any new plant is coming here anyway,” Donald Grinspoon said, “not without the I-491 leg. And we’ll all be long in the grave before that gets built.”

  “Maybe we could get a junior college,” Katherine Hardihood suggested.

  “Or a prison,” Sheriff Norman F. Cole said.

  “Or a landfill,” D. William Aitchbone said.

  “Or a nuclear power plant,” Delores Poltruski said.

  “I like Katherine’s junior college idea,” said Phyllis Bastinado, principal at G.A. Hemphill Elementary. Phyllis Bastinado was a huge woman, the approximate weight and shape of a fully inflated farm tractor tire.

  That’s when Donald Grinspoon demonstrated just why he never lost an election. “Those are all fine ideas. Even the Japanese auto plant is a fine idea, Bill, if you eliminate the Japanese part. But all of those things would take years. We need something now. Something that puts us back on the map right away. Tuttwyler’s drying up like a prune.”

  “Are you sure we can’t get the snack cake line back?” asked Dick Mueller. “Your wife’s a Tuttwyler.”

  Donald Grinspoon’s eyes filled with tears. “The Tuttwyler’s haven’t had a say in the company since the Fifties. If they had, it wouldn’t have moved to Tennessee in the first place.”

  Dick Mueller understood the tears in the mayor’s eyes. His wife was in bad shape, too. “What do hillbillies know about making snack cakes?”

  Everyone nodded. The company’s baked goods never tasted the same since the move, especially their famous chocolate cupcakes, with their script frosting T and whipped cream surprise inside.

  “I think we should have a festival,” Donald Grinspoon finally said, revealing the real reason for the meeting. “An annual festival that brings in folks from all over the state. From other states, too. A grand festival that will put us back on the map. Something that will make Tuttwyler so damn famous people will visit all year long. Tourism, ladies and gentlemen. That’s our ticket to prosperity.”

  Everyone agreed that an annual festival was grand idea. Everyone but Katherine Hardihood. “What are we going to be festive about?” she asked.

  Everyone waited to hear the mayor’s answer, certain he already knew what the festival should be about. Why would he have called the meeting otherwise? But Donald Grinspoon did not know what the festival should be about. “I’m not sure,” he confessed. “Tuttwyler isn’t really famous for anything. All we ever did around here was make snack cakes.”

  “What about Artie Brown?” said Dick Mueller, patriotically shaking his fist in the air. “Artie Brown Days! That would pull them in.”

  Only D. William Aitchbone had the nerve to challenge Dick Mueller’s blind love of country. “Nobody outside Tuttwyler gives a damn that Artie Brown hobbled on one foot for six miles.”

  Dick Mueller’s fist was now shaking squarely in D. William Aitchbone’s face. “He saved an entire company of Seabees from the goddamn Nips.”

  “There goes our Japanese auto plant,” Katherine Hardihood couldn’t resist whispering to Delores Poltruski.

  “Artie Brown Days was my first inclination, too,” Donald Grinspoon said. “But Bill’s right. Artie isn’t all that famous outside Tuttwyler.”

  “We could make him famous,” Sheriff Norman F. Cole said.

  Again Katherine Hardihood couldn’t resist. This time she didn’t whisper. “We could have a six-mile hobble. Our own little Boston Marathon.”

  Even Dick Mueller chuckled at that.

  “And we can’t forget what else Artie Brown is famous for,” D. William Aitchbone said. He was referring, of course, to Artie’s 1945 coupling with the appetizing but under-aged Lois Dornick, and, of course, the bastard son that unfortunate union produced.

  So there was no more talk of Artie Brown Days.

  “Too bad the snack cake line moved,” Phyllis Bastinado said, scratching the oat-bag of pink fat hanging from her horse jaws. “We could have Cupcake Days.”

  Everyone diverted their eyes and nodded.

  “We’ve got to be famous for something,” Delores Poltruski said.

  That’s when Katherine Hardihood discovered why Donald Grinspoon had invited her to the meeting. “Katherine, you’ve got all those old books and records and things at the library. Find our what we’re famous for!”

  And so Katherine Hardihood’s search for a festival began.

  Tuttwyler is the southern-most village in Wyssock County, the southern-most county in a three-million-acre swath of northeastern Ohio called the Western Reserve. Originally this three-million-acre swath was owned by God, who, for a long time, decided it should be covered by ice. After a while God let the ice melt, exposing gentle slopes and low hills, flatlands and swamps, lakes and rivers and creeks. Unfortunately there were no great mountains or waterfalls or caverns to give future tourists something interesting to gaze at.

  When the ice was gone, trees grew and animals migrated in. But these were fairly run-of-the mill animals: rabbits and raccoons and the like, nothing exotic for later vacationers to see. The only animals with any potential for tourism—woolly elephants called mammoths—were killed off by the first humans to find the iceless swath. These humans, later to be called Indians by other humans called Europeans, lived on the land for many thousands of years. And they never built any grand fortresses or temples to attract future visitors.

  In 1630, James I of England decided he owned this swath. Had he located his throne there, later-day sightseers would have had something grand to gaze at. Instead he granted the swath to the Earl of Warwick, who, along with a gaggle of puritans and witches, was busy creating future tourist destinations on another swath of land called Massachusetts.

  Eventually the swath went to the tiny upstart colony of Connecticut, which did nothing to enhance its tourism potential for the next one hund
red and seventy years. Neither did the French, nor the Eries and Hurons and Senecas, all of whom mistakenly thought the swath belonged to them. After the famous revolution that created dozens of future tourist destinations, Connecticut finally turned its attention to the swath and promptly sold it to forty-eight developers for, the fact-loving Katherine Hardihood read in one old book, a bargain-basement million-two.

  One of those forty-eight developers was a Yale-educated lawyer named Moses Cleaveland. In 1796, Cleaveland led fifty surveyors westward into the swath now called the Western Reserve. It was measured into counties and townships and settlers began trickling in.

  Settlers did not trickle into southern Wyssock County until after Ohio became a state in 1803. Those who trickled into the hills along Three Fish Creek were more concerned with planting wheat and corn than creating a future tourist destination. Search as she may through the library’s old books and records, Katherine Hardihood found nothing more interesting than the story of how Three Fish Creek got its name.

  “Well, Katherine,” said Mayor Donald Grinspoon when his hand-picked committee of saviors again gathered in his office, “what are we famous for?”

  “Not much,” she said, “though it is interesting how Three Fish Creek got its name.”

  “Really?” Dick Mueller said. “I’ve always wondered.”

  “You know, so have I,” Delores Poltruski said.

  Katherine Hardihood told them what she’d learned: “It was the Tuttwyler brothers themselves. John and Amos had just arrived from Connecticut and were looking for a place to build a grist mill and they were checking out all the creeks to find one strong enough to turn a waterwheel. According to The Official History of Wyssock County published by the New Waterbury Historical Society in 1938, John looked at the shallow creek and supposedly said ‘It haint much of a stream is it, Amos?’ And Amos supposedly said, ‘I bet there haint three fish in it.’ Then John supposedly said, ‘But it runs pretty fast and I bet these hills keeps it filled all summer.’ And so the Tuttwyler brothers decided to build their grist mill on the creek they now jokingly called Three Fish Creek.”

  “I don’t see how we make a festival out of that,” D. William Aitchbone said.

  “I think we better reconsider Artie Brown Days,” Dick Mueller said.

  Donald Grinspoon ordered Katherine Hardihood to keep digging.

  So the next morning she drove all the way to Berea to visit Helen Smith, a retired history professor at Baldwin Wallace College, who knew more about the swath called the Western Reserve than anyone alive. Helen Smith offered her buttered saltines and hot tea and they leafed through ancient, brittle-paged books that smelled for all the world like sweaty pioneers. Among Helen Smith’s old books was the 1847 edition of Henry Howe’s Historical Collections of Ohio, and the next week when Mayor Donald Grinspoon called the saviors together, Katherine Hardihood finally had something to report.

  What she had was the story of an Indian woman who was clubbed to death by white settlers on the bank of Three Fish Creek. Her newborn baby was clubbed to death, too.

  “Where’s the festival in that?” D. William Aitchbone wondered.

  Katherine Hardihood slowly picked her way through the facts she’d found in Henry Howe’s history: “It seems that several years later the ghost of this Indian woman appeared to a group of settlers burning stumps.”

  “Now it’s getting good,” Dick Mueller said.

  “Did she come right up out of the smoke?” Delores Poltruski asked.

  “I don’t know about that,” Katherine Hardihood said. “But according to the story, she forgave the whites for killing her and her baby.”

  Donald Grinspoon was elated. “Oh, that’s good.”

  Katherine Hardihood continued: “And she gave the settlers her blessing, saying, according to the story, of course, that ‘I am proud to be the last of my people to die for this sacred land. Now, my white brothers and sisters, it is your land. May you find peace and prosperity upon it. May it bless you in your time as it blessed my people in theirs.’”

  “Oh, Katherine! That’s damn good!” said Donald Grinspoon.

  Katherine Hardihood raised a cautious finger. “Maybe not so good. The whites who clubbed the Indian woman and her baby were John and Amos Tuttwyler.”

  Donald Grinspoon grabbed the edge of his desk. “Oh.”

  The implication of that fact did not immediately register with Dick Mueller. “Serves them right for moving the snack cake line.”

  D. William Aitchbone enlightened him. “The mayor’s wife is a Tuttwyler, Dick.”

  Dick Mueller felt terrible. “Oh, that’s right. Sorry.”

  Donald Grinspoon let go of his desk. He went to the window. He looked at the village square and the empty stores surrounding it. He looked at his own business, Grinspoon’s Department Store, which had survived the Great Depression and the closing of Tuttwyler Mills snack cake line in 1975, and was now having its worst November in seven years. Soon even the underwear would have to be marked down. He thought of his wife, and the hat trick of afflictions reshaping her body and mind. “Penny was born a Tuttwyler but she’s a Grinspoon now. And we Grinspoons do what we have to do.”

  And so Squaw Days was born.

  And now it is thirteen years later and D. William Aitchbone is chairman of the Squaw Days Committee, and Katherine Hardihood, home from the first meeting of the year, wearing a flannel nightgown and two pairs of socks, is wriggling into bed. From under her pile of pillows—where she also keeps a steak knife, claw hammer and can of mace—she pulls out her TV remote. She flips to WVIZ, Cleveland’s public television station. For the eighth time since Christmas they are broadcasting Yobisch Podka’s 1991 performance with the Santa Fe Symphony. Yobisch is just halfway through his most popular New Age monstrosity, Noir and Far. She quickly flips to Channel 19 and the local news: The Cleveland Indians’ equipment truck is leaving for Winter Haven, Florida, for the start of spring training. The driver is waving to the camera. On his cap and on his jacket, and even on the side of the truck’s long trailer, is Chief Wahoo, the team’s cartoon mascot with skin as red as an Italian tomato, huge eyes shaped like teepees, a Shylock nose, Japanese buckteeth protruding through a Stepinfetchit smile, a happy-go-lucky little Injun, safely locked away in the American League cellar most of his imaginary life. The camera also shows a few seconds of the CRI, Cleveland’s Real Indians, protesting, as they do every spring, the team’s racist insensitivity. Prominent among the five or six CRI members shaking homemade signs is their leader, emerald-eyed Ernest Not Irish.

  Katherine Hardihood turns off the TV and turns on the radio, the dial glued by years of habit to Cleveland’s only big band station. Dinah Shore is singing a song Katherine first heard when she was a little girl, when her parents were still alive and her world was still a safe and beautiful place: “If you want to do right by your appetite … If you’re fussy about your food … Take a choo-choo today, head New England way … And we’ll put you in the happiest mood with … Shoo fly pie and apple pan dowdy … Makes your eyes light up, your tummy say howdy … Shoo fly pie and apple pan dowdy … I never get enough of that wonderful stuff.”

  4

  Howie Dornick has a clock radio, but he never uses it to wake up. His brain gets him up. “When I get in bed I just tell myself what time I need to get up, and I do,” he often brags at the Eagles Club, where he won the very clock radio he never uses in a Friday night raffle. Howie Dornick is a member of the Eagles, but not the VFW, though he did spend a year in Japan with the Air Force during the early years of the Vietnam War. No one had to tell him that the illegitimate son of Artie Brown wasn’t welcome at the Artie Brown Post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

  Howie Dornick told himself to get up at four-thirty. So at exactly four-thirty his eyes open and he swings out of the bed he’s slept in since he was twelve. He quick-steps to the bathroom. He urinates and brushes his teeth and washes his face. It being Friday, he doesn’t shower; he showers on Saturdays, Monda
ys and Wednesdays. He does rub his armpits with Right Guard. He also checks his undershorts to see if he can get another day out of them, which he decides he can. Back in the bedroom he puts on his thermal underwear and a plaid shirt and his canvas overalls. It is still dark outside, though from the street light in front of his two-story frame he can see that the snow has stopped.

  He groans all the way down the steps, his fingers leaving yet another streak of oil on the wallpaper. It has been twenty years since he put that wallpaper up for his mother; gray and white kittens playing in blue petunias, not the pattern Howie would have preferred. In the 1930s even shoestring houses like his were built with fireplaces. On the mantle rests his father’s prosthetic foot and a photograph of his mother, taken when she was cafeteria manager at G.A. Hemphill Elementary School.

  In the kitchen he puts on his boots, and while waiting for a teakettle of water to boil for his Thermos of instant coffee, he sits at his little table and eats three Tuttwyler snack cakes—one jelly roll and two chocolate cupcakes with the famous script T icing. You can take the Tuttwyler Mills snack cake line out of Tuttwyler, but you can’t take the snack cakes out of a Tuttwylerite’s diet; everyone knows that everyone secretly eats a lot of them.

  He walks to the village hall. No one is there yet. No one will be there for hours. He pours himself a coffee and turns up the heat. There is only one piece of paper in his mailbox, a note from Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne asking him to meet him at the gazebo at 9:30. He finishes his coffee and goes outside to shovel the walk. He sprinkles de-icing pellets. He goes back inside for second cup of coffee and then, with a big empty cardboard box under one arm and a ladder under the other, wades through the snow to the gazebo and takes down the plastic pine garland and red plastic bows. Surely that’s what the mayor wants to see him about. It is always good to have a job done when you’re told for the umpteenth time to get it done. He stores the box and ladder away and drives the village pickup to the fire station to scrape the snow away from the doors.