Raincrow Final edit

                                                     Chapter 1

     I am nameless at the start of this story. I was born in the heat of August here at Saint Anthony’s Hospital and Orphanage. I have been here 5 months now, first in intensive care and now out in the ward. They have the respiratory troubles under control. The scar from a surgery for an umbilical hernia is healing. I am separated from the other children down the hall.

     From this crib on the fifth floor I can see the light fading. Through the big ward window I watch the sun drop with its cold fire below the horizon. It is a December Friday night, and evening shadows fall quickly. On the big river, Jack Frost crystals form along the sandbars, and an icy gray mist leads toward the snow that will fall during the night. The lights of the town begin to blink on. People start towards their homes. Parking lots empty, as workers leave the great expanses of Minneapolis- Moline, John Deere, and International Harvester. Tail lights wind out of downtown Rock Island, up the bluff, past this old building which stands surrounded by trees, cut into the side of the hill, looking off across the Mississippi river valley. A statue of its patron saint, Anthony, looks down the bluff, his hospital peering over his shoulder.

    On the third floor the bell for Compline rings up the stairwells. The whole order gathers to chant. “He summons clouds from the ends of the earth, makes lightning produce the rain; from His treasuries He sends forth the wind.” The echoing footsteps of a novice who waited till the last bell reach the bottom of the stairs.

     During this time, I’ve been in the care of Sister Louise. She will sit with me in the long night hours, and during the day she tells me things she tells no one else. I miss her gentle presence as the dark shadows pull in around me. She is down in the chapel.

      There is a small dark form at the window. It pecks at the pane. The street lights glint on its dark feathers. There is a form in the darkness. As it draws near I instinctively withdraw, both mentally and physically. The inexorable weight begins. Pushing me downward, and ever downward. I cannot breathe. The fever dreams begin.

    I feel I am no longer in the hospital. I am lying in the dark of night, on a plain, in a hard country, far from humans. There, shadowy figures move just inside the first trees of a vast forest.

   “What is a child without a name?” the dark one asks.

   I wrap my arms around myself so tightly that they will be bowed all the days of my life. Compline ends. The Night nurse begins her rounds. Sister Louise comes silently in the middle of the night to find me awake, softly crying. She gathers me up and holds me close.

       Sister Louise stops in the grotto on a spring morning in 1955. Holy Saturday. The parents are coming to pick up the baby this morning. The Virgin spreads wide her arms, Harry the gardener kneels in the jonquils with his hearing aid turned off, oblivious to Louise as she kneels on the flagstone pavement. She prays, “Blessed Mother, I beg of your Sacred Heart. Intercede with your son for me. Tell Him how much I love. Let them be kind. Watch over them. Pray for me, Blessed Virgin.”

       The wind has shifted from the north this morning, high white clouds blow past, their shadows crossing the courtyard. Sister’s wimple flutters in the breeze. Down in the river valley a cannon volley is fired at the Rock Island arsenal. Neither she nor Harry hears it.

     Louise came here as a novice in 1948. She grew up down the hill, on the north side of Rock Island. She came to St. Anthony’s as a child with her parents. They would light novena candles in the darkness of the church, stained glass the only other light. Her father, a painter, fell off a ladder and was buried up on the crest of the hill, in the old cemetery, up the path behind the convent. Her only brother, Francis, was run over by a utilities truck on his way home from school. He was 11. Her mother still walked up the hill to Mass every morning. After her last day of high school, her mother walked with her up the hill and she entered the novitiate, dedicating her life, a bride of Christ.

    She rose from her knees hesitantly. She walked to the administration building. Mother Superior Mary Joan looked up from the papers on her desk as she entered the office.

    “Sister Louise, I’d like you to meet the Raincrow’s. They are here from Peoria.”

   “Good Morning.”

    The warm air in the office fogged up her glasses.

   “These are the adoption papers. I’ve filled them out and only need your signatures- here, and here, and on this one.” She pushed the papers across the desk.

     Sister arranged the papers on her desk again. she had a compulsive habit of arranging and rearranging.

    “I wanted Sister Louise to be here in case you had any questions. She has spent the most time with this child. It was a rough winter for him. Doctor Saline says he is in good health now.”

    Louise studied the couple. Harley and Eve Green. Not all that young. The man was something of a dandy, cashmere topcoat, initialed cufflinks, tailored suit, and curly hair. He smoked and looked back at her with a detachment that made her feel one of them was not in the room.

    The woman had long dark brown hair, eyes with a steady devout blue light. Her face already a little worn, a look of concern and need. Early thirties maybe. Louise’s reaction was that these people were not meant to spend their lives together. This woman would take care of her child, though.

    Sister Mary Joan pushed back in her chair. Her bulk seemed always to be ready to spill out from that woolen habit. Sweat beaded on her brow. “The child was born here. His mother was one of our nurses’ aides. I cannot tell you much more. All of this information is confidential. These files can never be released.”

    The woman looked toward Louise. She saw the great longing there. “Will you walk with us and tell us what we need to know?”

   “I will.”

    They talked down the corridors to the parking lot where the man’s Cadillac was parked. They tucked me into a car seat, lit cigarettes and pulled out of the lot down the hill, and off downstate.

     Ellen Erickson worked at the dime store in downtown Rock Island. When she was done with her shift she would look up the hill to St. Anthony’s and stop on the corner. Was her baby still up there? They had never let her see it.

    Last winter, before her 21^st birthday, she had been working at the hospital. On one of her nights off she met a college boy from over at Knox College in Galesburg. Good looking. He wasn’t tall, but he towered over her. He made her laugh. He was going somewhere; and that confused her. She had no concept of anything but day to day living.

   She was one of 11 children. Her father, an alcoholic, had walked out on his family at the height of the great depression. She had been raised in an endless stream of orphanages like the one on the hill. She had no contact with any of her family.

   The college boy, James, had taken her out on Saturday night to the Drive In. It was back in the last row I was conceived. She never told him. She never saw him again.

   At 5 months she developed complications. She remained at the hospital, bedridden, until I came. They took me. She never got to hold her child.

   When she left the hospital she took the job at the five and dime. After six weeks there she saw a woman in the checkout line that just looked familiar. The woman met her eyes, and asked, “Don’t I know you?”

   “I don’t know. I’ve never seen you.”

    “ Did you grow up around here?”

     “Yes. My family split up.”

    The woman started putting her groceries on the conveyor.

     “My family split up too. I found my mother and a sister.”

     Ellen started ringing up her groceries

     “What were their names?”

      The woman peered at her again from underneath long bangs. “My name is June Johnson. My sister is Sylvia, and my mothers name is Cecilia.”

    “Yes.” she stood holding a can of Crisco. “ I think I must be your sister.”

      Monday morning. The sun shone brightly through the Venetian blinds. Eve laid me down in the bedroom. My brown eyes looked back into her blue ones. She had prayed long and hard for this. She had one pregnancy, which went full term. They named the baby Stephen. He had lived 3 days and was buried in Newman cemetery. She could not bring herself to go out there. Her 5 sisters had housefuls of children. Well, not sister Rachel who was in the convent. Having babies to them was like breathing. Her own mother had 9, raised in a tiny house during the depression on a civil servants wage.

   Was it her man? He’d gone to the doctor. Low sperm count they said. Was it her?

    No need to think about it any more. There was a child here.

   Her husband had gone into work that Monday. She had hoped he would stay home with her. I had been baptized on Easter Sunday at Saint Philomena’s. Her mother and sister’s were there. Loving her, they knew how much this meant to her. I was christened, Thomas Francis Raincrow.

    My daddy carried me out to the Cadillac. None of his people lived in town, so his wife’s family had adopted him, in a way. When a family is that big, what is one more?

He pulled off the dirt road into the driveway of the small house he had bought his wife.

This child would take some getting used to. He liked doing things in his own time. When the house got too small, he left. It seemed to him, no matter how much his wife loved him, that she never really approved of what he said, or what he did. No matter what that was. He had never really spent that much time with babies. He thought he could learn to hold the child without feeling nervous- but he wasn’t really sure. Sometimes he thought he wasn’t sure of anything. She had talked him into this. It sure wasn’t a bad idea, but it would take some getting used to. He was around the house until about 3 when he said,

  “I’m going down to Arnie’s house to look at his new Pointer.”

   “Now?”

    She could make it sound like that was the stupidest thing in the world to say. Or do.

   “Why not?”

   “Don’t you want to hold your son?”

   “Looks like he’s been on your lap all day.”

   The door closed behind him. No matter. They had gone to bed before he returned. I slept with her that first night. Sister Louise had told her I rarely slept through the night, but she thought that was just the loneliness. Sometimes she would walk up the stairs from the convent to check on me and find I was rigid and covered with sweat, wide-awake. She confided that she had asked Mother Superior if she could move a cot into the wardroom. The answer was no.

     We seemed to melt together. If I woke at all except for an early morning feeding, she was not aware of it. Her husband was gone to work before she arose. He liked to go in early, and he liked to get out of bed, fumble for his clothes and go out the door in about ten minutes. The man was not a kitchen table, newspaper, coffee drinker.

   Eve had left her job at the phone company last year. Harley was making good money at Muirson Label. He ran a big multi color press, and was lead man on the day shift. Illinois had a strong union, and there was all the overtime you wanted. She liked staying home, and she had needed a reason to stay home for. Same reason she’d always wanted.

    She picked me up and walked through the silent house with me. She wanted to show me everything. She wanted to show me the world. There were no end to the possibilities. She lit a cigarette as she turned on her Hi Fi. It was her proudest possession.

   These things were scarce as hen’s teeth in 1955. She started the Student Prince. Smoke curled in the sunlight through the blinds and she and I danced. She could see I loved the music.

   “We’ll sing together, you and I.” We sat in the sun in the afternoon. Harley’s dogs stayed quiet in their kennel. She read and listened to the chickadees in their apple trees, and the wind in the neighbor’s cottonwood, across the alley. “I’m not alone anymore.”

  Those first dark memories were covered up, for all time, probably. I went from that unremembered loneliness, to unrequited love in what seemed like an instant. Oh, how I loved her. She sang, and she smelled good, and she moved like liquid. She had things like her, around her. She liked to be out of doors. We were meant for each other.

      Eve was afraid of storms. She was determined not to let me see that fear. I think she learned not to be afraid by doing that. We would sit and listen and watch the late afternoon thunderstorms roll in.

    “The angels are bowling up in heaven. Hear them?”

    “Well, he’s walking.”

   “Good?”

   “Yes. Takes off through the house. Sis, hang on a sec- I’m going to check on him.” Eve laid the phone on the table. I stood at the screen door, wobbly but balanced. “He’s O.K. Have you talked to Mom lately?”

   I hear the bubble of voices from the kitchen. I explore this small world. Outside through the screen is space and noise and smells- inside are shadows, and things that remind me of mother. Father’s presence is relegated to the basement and garage. I tried to crawl down to the basement once but was apprehended. The garage was a distant memory. It was cold out there even with the little firebox stove going full blast. The basement was dark and scary. There was a room against the back wall that I would never go in. It was the darkness there.

    In the house the air was smoke; Luckies and Camels. There was a box on the wall something came out of and made noise- (a cuckoo clock I learned, years later.) there are soft places and hard places. On the floor (which I regard with disdain now that I can walk) there are things to examine. Sometimes I hear, “No, No, No!” There is the place the music comes from. There is mother’s scent, White Shoulders. There is the man on the wall whose eyes follow you everywhere you go. He is always there. If you are in that room, He is watching you.

   Sometimes the big people poke at you. Sometimes you get picked up and carried places when you really don’t want to go. Sometimes it turns out to be a good idea. There is old friend, pain, who comes sometimes, usually unexpectedly, but sometimes you see him coming. There is the little room with the water in it that you can’t quite reach. There is the dark place in the closet. It is filled with the shadows I remember from the orphanage, but I’ve not felt that weight here.

   Getting carried by dad is different. You are much higher. There is hair to hold onto up there. There is hair all over this one. Usually you go outside with dad. Out where those wild creatures are. They see you coming and begin to jump and whine. Dad walks fast. He is louder. His breath smells like the smoke, but also has a sweet smell when he drinks from those shiny cans.

   Where does he go? Mother is always here. He comes when it is almost dark and passes by. Even on the sunny mornings he leaves. I leave the screen door and look up at the man on the wall. “Peas.” the man looks down. I toddle into the kitchen.

   “Hello Tom,” mother says into the phone. “He’s returned from his travels, sis”

   I squint up at mother. “Peas.” Oh, that’s not right- there’s an L sound I’m not getting in there.

   “I think he just said something. Thomas, what did you say dear?”

  “Peas.” Rats. That’s not right.

  “Sounds like peas. Are you hungry?”

  Hopeless.

   In my father’s world, there was the motion. Always thinking of where you were going next, thinking past where you were. He was never about feelings, he was about duty, and misplaced honor, about work, and his no-good friends; and distance. He kept himself aloof with his grownup toys, his tinkering and his running around. It was not that he couldn’t be kind, you had to catch him to see it, and that was work. I think Eve was beginning to tire of trying to catch him. When this happens you will see the anger come, that hopeless anger which in reality is caused by realizing how futile your efforts are at changing another human being. Can’t do it. Not through love or anger. So the biggest distance in their lives was the void between them.

   There was no way he could see to change, because there was nothing wrong. That downward slide into alcoholism is beautiful, at first, and so, unnoticeable. My father thought he could lick anything on his own. He didn’t even know what he was up against.

    The best place in the world is on mother’s lap when she gets out the books. June bugs bang against the screen. The traffic and the busy streets seem far away. The night sounds are liquid through the windows. The light comes from her somewhat tattered Oriental lampshade. Mother has a great love for things Oriental- she knows she will never see this part of the great world, but she knows it’s simplicities, it’s subtle hues and distilled light. She has an oriental knick-knack shelf shaped like a pagoda. It holds her treasures.

     She reads the stories and poems and points with her fingers. There is animal crackers, where go the boats? The lamplighter, yet gentle will the griffin be, (what the grandpa told the children) when the frost is on the pumpkin, the purple cow, the highwayman, and Daniel Boone. The Child Craft books have pictures that take you all around the world. I’m doing basic reading at the age of three. Follow mother’s fingers. Sound out those vowels and consonants. Mother makes up stories. Whatever the story is, she will put the characters in different situations “How does it end Tom?”

    “They all live ever after, and then after that too. Let’s sing.” The only thing as good as the stories are the songs.

    Mother Eve has music in her heart. Her voice is pure and sweet. Her mother was the organist at St. Mark’s, and led the choir. She sings the songs of the church and the radio and the popular stuff you get on the car radio WMBD. I sing along. At first my theory is, loud is better. Mother shakes her finger. “Softly. Watch your tempo.” At 3, I can sing melody to “You are my Sunshine” as mother adds the harmony part. I have memorized the words to sink the Bismarck, and it is somewhat unnerving to my uncle James to see a three-year-old march around the house singing this complicated military song, which he does not understand. As an only child I find there are advantages and disadvantages. I get way too many Christmas presents, but there is usually no one around to play with them. I have the undivided attention of my parents, but I look at my cousins and all their brothers and sisters with a mix of curiosity and desire.

       From down in the basement came the sound of father’s printing press. He had dug an addition under the front wall of the house himself, a small cave to set up this second hand Chief 17. He still had the first shift job at Muirson, but he had this urge to have his own shop. The year before, in the fall, he had been reaching down into the delivery to pull out a sheet for a time stamp, something he’d done a million times before, and the press had nicked off the end of his index finger up to the first joint- slick as a whistle. He stood there in shock not believing you could lose a part of yourself that quickly. The second man on the press didn’t notice Harley standing there his face going white and crimson running to the floor. He pulled a sheet and stood checking register and backup.

He glanced over.

   “Oh shit. Harley. Sit down here boy.” He pulled a stool over from the color booth. He grabbed a shop rag to wrap and compress Harley’s hand. “Bud!” he yelled. His flyboy came around from the feeder. “Go up to the office and get some help. See if Gene Marks is in his office. He’ll know what to do.”

   They drove him to St. Francis in the company car. At the emergency room where Eve would soon be working nights to make ends meet they stopped the bleeding and gave him some morphine. A week later he was back on the job.

    So he put in a couple of hours a night down here in the basement. He somehow didn’t really feel a part of what was going on upstairs.

    Harley Raincrow came from the hills of southern Indiana. His daddy Leonard was a limestone miner. They lived in Peerless, right outside of Bloomington, and daddy mined the Oolitic limestone that built the courthouses, churches and schools of a hundred towns across the Midwest. Leonard married Ardith Stone when he and she were both 16. He grew into a hard man, 12 hour days at the quarry, whiskey and gambling at night, it was rumored he went to clan meetings. They had three children together in five years. Harley was first born, then brother Aaron and sister Judith two days shy of their mother’s 21^st birthday. When Harley was seven, and Judith only two, their parents took them in the model A to their grandparent’s house. On the way they began an argument in the front seat that left the children cringing down in the back seat. Father slammed on the brakes, threw the emergency brake and left the A idling in the road. Mother jumped out of the passenger side and running as fast as those short little legs on the 5 foot one inch frame could carry her, she tried to cross the creek. Leonard caught her in midstream and began choking her, knee deep in branch water. Harley watched out of the window as his father came to himself and let go, leaving Ardith lying limp in the creek water. He walked back to the A and surveyed his children sitting there in wild-eyed fright. He grabbed his hat and started back down the road the way they had come.

     Harley watched his father fade into the sunny summer distance, the road curling back down the hill, a tunnel of trees. He got out of the car and climbed down the creek bank. Mother was sitting up, the water damming against her back, her hair wild and one eye swelling closed. She got up dripping and took Harley by the hand. He watched as she climbed up into the drivers seat. He squeezed into the back seat.

    The car lurched away, threatened to go into the ditch and started down the hill towards grandmother’s, way too fast. Ardith always had trouble reaching that foot pedal so she pulled the hand brake and ground the stick down into second gear. The model A backfired all the way down into the hollow.

    Grandma and Grandpa were asleep in their chairs on the porch. Grandpa was a Baptist preacher and had been in the pulpit raining down fire and brimstone an hour earlier. The smell of ham came from the woodstove inside, chickens pecked in the dust. Grandpa woke up and raised his eyes as the car pulled up to the porch.

   “Ardith, why weren’t you at church this morning,” he saw her wet dress, tangled hair and swollen eye. “May the Lord smite that man!” He held his hands in the air. “Come into the house. Woman, set the table for these children.”

   “They will have to stay with you.” She stared down at the table.” I’m not going back to him. I’ll stay in Bloomington. Aunt Mary will put me up and I can work at the feed store.”

   The depression was raging all across America. In southern Indiana men from the towns were off riding the rails, the farms were staggering along, even the quarrymen were thinned out to a few top hands. There were hobo camps in the river bottoms. Grandpa would have a tough road with three more mouths to feed.

   The children were to stay there until Harley started High school at Needmore. He grew up fast. He terrorized his brother Aaron. In all his life his brother would be a bitter man. Much more successful than his brother, he walked with a chip on his shoulder, and had none of his brothers charisma. Sister Judith as the third child was quiet and avoided these brothers, she had a rare beauty that drew people to her, but was so quiet she was like a beautiful ghost. Harley would not wait to walk his sister to school; walking on far ahead. He soon learned that his grandparents only saw what they wanted to see, and were really too busy to watch what he did. He ran the creeks fishing, he swam in the blueholes. He ran the Wabash and Monon railroad tracks with a stray dog named Toby, till the dog got caught on a trestle and bounced off the cowcatcher down into the creek below. He skipped school till he got caught. He smoked corn shuck cigarettes and danced down at the miner’s hall. He learned to play malaguena and Spanish Fandango, and Wabash blues on his cousin J. Red Gibson’s, guitar. He saw his daddy a few times. When he was 13 years old his daddy died. Of “excess”. Was that what they put on the coroner’s report? No. But that was what it was.

   Mother Ardith came down from Bloomington on Sunday mornings for service. She drove a car that belonged to a man friend in Bloomington. She would stay through the afternoon and walk and talk- sit in the sun, work on the lesson books. Harley wanted to go. He wanted to be somewhere else. Aaron and Judith went to Bloomington with their mother overnight. Not Harley. His grandparents seemed to be in a constant state of confusion with a small farm to run, sermons to write, a whirlwind of children and troubles; Grandfather was nearly 70.

   In his sophomore year at Needmore, Harley’s mother moved west to Illinois. She took a job at the Hiram Walker distillery in Peoria. She sent money home. That year grandfather died, and the children took the Monon to Peoria to live. Harley was a country kid in a city that was growing up hard and lean. A union town, people were getting over the depression. Caterpillar tractor company was based in Peoria. Many of Thomas’s relatives worked there. There was a lot to learn. Harley went to Manual high school, which was a technical and trade school. He took a job at the Piggly Wiggly store, sacking groceries.

   Harley also had to get used to city girls. Back in the country, he’s grown up around country girls, they were familiar; now there was a stream of good looking fast talking girls, who wanted to go roller skating and dancing with a good looking young country boy, who got over his shyness in a big hurry. He went out with lots of girls. He bought a 34 Ford, and always had cigarette money.

   As he was sweeping up in the back of the store waiting for his shift to end he looked up and saw Eve pretending not to notice him as she sorted through hair ribbons and greeting cards. She was an inch taller than he was and so slender and long legged that she seemed to be from another world, a place he had dreamed of but never thought he might attain.

    “What are you staring at?” she said and he realized he had been doing just that.

  Now Harley, in spite of being on a learning curve in a bigger world than he had known existed, was never at a loss for words. He had the Welshman’s gift for oratory.

   “Aren’t you a tall drink of water.”

   This was decidedly not what Eve was used to. She thought of boys as tongue-tied shuffling oafs, who got red in the face when she addressed them.

   “Where have you been keeping yourself, sister?” Eve thought that there was a possibility she might be a little flushed.

   “And who might be asking?”

   “Harley Raincrow. Proprietor of this establishment. Mr. Piggly Wiggly himself.

   “Well Mr. Piggly Wiggly. I’ve been coming to this store all my life and I’ve never seen you around.”

    “This ain’t the only store I’ve got to look after. Hell, I’ll be in Indianapolis tomorrow, maybe.”

   “To sweep floors there?”

   “Got to be done. Now I’ve got to do the payroll. Say sister, what do you do for fun around this little burg?”

    “Is this the bum’s rush?”

    “On the level.”

    “Give me a smoke and I’ll clue you in.”

    A month later, November 30^th, they were married in the rectory at St Mark’s church. They couldn’t get married in the main church because Harley hadn’t taken instruction. What went on in there was a light year removed from that little Baptist church down in Peerless. Ritual and stained glass, icons and statues. All in a foreign language, with the priest’s back turned toward you. He went to please Eve. Somehow the ritual pleased him as well.

    December 7^th, 1941. A little over a week later, Harley enlists and gets his orders. He won’t see his bride for almost 4 years.

   Harley goes through basic in Wyoming. Blowing sand, huge open spaces with precious little greenery. He’s assigned to the armored infantry, driving half-tracks and armored personnel carriers. After basic he’s attached to the third army in North Africa. Still no green. Almost 6 months in Northern Africa, sometimes advancing 50 miles a day through Tunisia with Patton’s army, chasing the desert fox. On into Egypt, then across the Mediterranean, triumphant to Sicily where they do a dramatic end around to beat Monty that winds up costing him the 3^rd Army. Then it’s up the boot of Italy with general Mark Clark. Twenty-one years old and the new guys in the outfit call him the old man.

    Just a few Kilometers from the German border, a few weeks before the end of the war, while leading a column, a mortar shell explodes next to the jeep Harley is driving. Harley has 18 chunks of metal burrowing in, from the top of his head to his buttocks. He crawls into a culvert, bleeding profusely, and, in shock, refuses to come out. The column is held up for over an hour. Harley is sent to a field hospital where he sees the war end. He heals fast, but will carry those scars the rest of his life.

   During all this time he writes to his wife. I had his vmail for a long while. After the second year her letters stop. Why? At the railroad station in Peoria Illinois, on a rainy Sunday morning, after a brutal, stormy trip across the Atlantic on a troop ship, and an all night train trip, he ponders what this new postwar world will be. His family has moved on west to Omaha Nebraska. At least they write him. Should he stay on the train, just pass by, go on? This is a stranger here he is married to.

   So, it’s one of those decisions that affect our whole lives. Like a pyramid, the lives of all who come after. Harley grabs his bag and leaves the train. There is no one there waiting for him.

       Finnell was a dirt road in the 50’s. It curved back and forth through the subdivision. Past small houses with big yards (at least it seemed so then) owned and rented by families who were doing all right in those Eisenhower days. We thought we were pretty well off then, I mean we Americans. We won the big one, and all the turmoil of the 60’s was something we couldn’t even guess at. Finnell ran parallel to Kickapoo creek, through tracts of scrub timber and weeds, now covered with concrete as the Interstate runs down its old course to downtown and the Illinois River. Forest Hills was the main road two blocks down. You could get a float at the Velvet Freeze there, or a roast beef sandwich at the new bowling alley, or penny candy at the A&P.

     The neighborhood was full of kids and dogs. There was the man who raised pigeons across the street. I would watch fascinated, as the man would show off his prizewinners. One Halloween evening I accompanied the mans lanky son on a hunt for a pigeon killing dog who had somehow gotten into the coop. We wandered for blocks in the growing darkness telling scary stories. We did not find the culprit.

     There was the man who raised rabbits and beagle hounds (one hell of a noisy combination) up the alley. Some days you could hear the sounds of screaming rabbits as the man butchered them.

     There were 2 married schoolteachers next door up, The Archer’s. Their only son Jesse was a fountain of facts and imagination. Jesse had a memory like Thomas’s. He knew about things you wouldn’t expect an 8 year old to know about. I wondered if his schoolteacher parents would quiz him around the house. “Eh, a ice cream sandwich Jesse boy if you know the capital of Alabama.” Jesse was a big red headed freckle covered live wire.

      Mrs. Pinlett lived two doors up with her daughter Rita. They modeled their lives after Hollywood’s version of Middle America, T.V. dinner’s, ringlets, Brenda Lee, And Sara Lee too. Rita was the pinkest thing I’d ever seen. She and I would grow close then drift apart- close and drift. I could not tell where Rita’s thoughts were from day to day; neither could she. Rita’s father was a traveling salesman who was gone most of the time. Next door to the Pinletts was a tiny little house. It had a big front lot that was never mowed. The old man who lived there sat on his porch unmoving for hours. One day I was at the Pinletts house playing with Rita in a little kiddy pool alongside the house. I looked over toward the old mans house. His chair was tipped over and the old man was lying motionless on the steps. His false teeth were lying beside him on the ground. Mrs. Pinlett called the ambulance. Too late.

     The Schmidt family lived two doors farther up, six children. Their young mother only 29, their father worked at a fertilizer plant. His car smelt like an outhouse. Their son Jack was a good friend. His life was a very strict one. Rules were unbending, money was tight. He thought my house was paradise. He was allowed to spend the night once and stayed up till midnight. He had never been up that late before. His mother held him so close, and Jack was not the rebellious type. He confided to me that when he had been small, before they had moved to this house, he had been playing with a friend and had accidentally poked the kid’s eye out with a stick. I was a little uneasy about this fact at first.

    I had the run of the neighborhood as long as I kept a few rules. Tell somebody if you were going to be out of sight. Figure out who the rock throwers were. This last was a tough lesson. I always seemed to be getting my head banged. Baseball bats, brickbats, falling forward, falling back, I attracted the goose eggs. The lesson came one late afternoon in the early spring. I started off to the Kickapoo woods with my good friend Jesse, and Jesse’s friend, Robert, both a year older. As we walked east down the gravel road, I was oblivious to everything but the cool afternoon breezes, and the sunlight on my back. Head down, I ran smack into Robert in the road.

    “Go back.”

    It didn’t even register.

    “Git.”

    “Why?”

    Robert reached down in the weeds on the side of the road. He picked up a jagged stone, which fit neatly into his fist. “I bet I throw this at you.”

    It was to be a valuable lesson. Robert obviously didn’t want to share Jesse, I was to become painfully unaware of the old adage, three’s a crowd. I was also surprised by Robert’s violent nature, something, at age 7, I hadn’t seen before.

   “You wouldn’t.” Such faith in human nature. Robert leaned back and heaved. The pain was quick, and not so bad really. What hurt was watching them continue on toward the woods through a red haze, until I began running towards home with the front of my shirt turning livid red.

    So, you watched those rock throwers carefully as they came and went in your life. Jesse told him later he wanted to help, and I believed him, but I find that rock throwers never apologize, and they don’t change.

  Mom’s can be of only so much help in these matters. They clean you up and give you some TLC.

      Jesse, to his credit stopped running around with Robert. The incident was never mentioned again. It was better when there were just two, anyway. Out in the backyard we waged pitched battles with hordes of Comanche’s, Sioux, and Blackfeet. We stormed the beaches of Normandy, and manned destroyers in the Pacific. We uncovered spy rings for the ol’ US of A, and knocked 9^th inning grand slams over the center field wall at Yankee stadium.

    One Sunday afternoon in January we were playing alongside the garage. I heard mom call through the kitchen window, “ Don’t go anywhere, we’ll eat in 20 minutes.” I thought of the Sunday roast in the oven, how the warmth would be after the January chill. Then my mind slipped back into the game.

    Jesse had heard my mom through the window. He walked out of the yard with me following, immersed in our imaginations. We walked toward the creek; oblivious to the fact I was doing exactly what my mom had told me not to do. In the dusk along the edge of the woods we walked as Harleys big blue Cadillac pulled up along side. He rolled the window down. “Didn’t your mother tell you to stay close?”

    I came back to reality. What do you say? There is no excuse. I got in the big back seat. Jesse stood watching us go. Harley never thought to give Jesse a ride.

    “What were you thinking?”

     Silence.

    Dad was a distant object that walked and talked, came and went. He told you things that you could not understand, and was impatient because you were a child and enjoyed being a child. Dad was of the world of men. When I was very little he would let me climb on him and pretend he was my ol’horse and I would ride and sometimes he would buck and make horse noises, and grunt if I bounced too hard- now I was a boy and he thought to teach me the ways of men. In his way. He had left the world of children far behind; if he had ever really known it. There was a huge distance between father and son in that blue Cadillac.

    Mother straightens her flowered apron and lights a cigarette as she watches her two men come in from the driveway.

   “Thomas, what did I tell you?”

    I wake from one of the fever dreams. In it was the dark place, always the dark place. I felt the weights, the suffocating sandbags. Sometimes the dark wings hovering above like hordes of locusts; other times an immense, still, silent form, darkly breathing. Other times the immense weight begins whirling, out of control back and forth taking everything in the world with it. Once the fever started when dad was watching me while mom worked nights at St Francis hospital. He had the tv on but I was laying behind him and could only hear the soundtrack of an old b movie the abominable snowman. I could imagine this thing out in the neighborhood. It made scratchy noises and howled down by the creek and looked over the schoolyard fence and soon there were lots of snowmen and the were in the schoolhouse and the timber and dad heard me sniffling back there and carried me in to bed. He put his hand on my forehead. “You’re burning up.” I heard him talk on the phone. The fever was pulsing and spinning it carried me out into the room and it sat me up in the very top corner by the stairs where I could see Thomas down there clenching his fists and shaking sweat running off him. The snowmen and the alphabet and then it all started spinning. It would not stop.

    The doctor comes. I can see him down there from up by the ceiling. He puts his stethoscope back in his bag. “Keep a cool towel on his head. I was just across the street.

 The Barkley boy had a temperature of 105. It broke. Just keep this child still, if you can.”

  When Eve is there she stays with me. She stays until the weight is gone.

       Harley takes me with him on Saturdays. He taught me to hunt morel mushrooms. We would walk for what seemed like hours looking for vague, indistinct objects on the ground. I didn’t like the way they looked, the first time I saw them. I remember the late afternoon sun disappearing in a thunder cloud and eating those same suspicious looking mushrooms fried up by Eve. Dipped in egg batter and rolled in cracker crumbs, I could not get enough. I still can’t.

     We would walk the dogs out through the frozen winter fields by Kickapoo creek. I’d kick the milkweed pods and watch their feathery seeds blow off across the snow. Harley barked at me, “Watch out for that barbed wire fence.” I didn’t see anything, I fell over it and ripped my down coat. I was leaking feathers till Eve sewed it up. He taught me about Bob Whites, and he could call them.

      Still, I don’t really remember talking to him about anything. I’ve listened while he told his stories, to others, not often to me, and they were good stories, He told me things I was definitely NOT to tell mother, I didn’t, I’ve heard him explain things, give me what for; but mostly we just did things, and told each other as much as we thought the other needed to know.

     We were quiet together. Fishing, at the golf course, he knew that I knew he was glad to be there. If I was, good, but it didn’t affect his day.

   On Saturdays, Eve picks up the vestments from St. Marks and washes irons and folds them. To walk through the dining room one dodges chasubles and albs hanging everywhere. She prefers her men to get out of the house while she is working. Sometimes dad and I start the day at the hardware, sometimes we drive down to the Illinois River. There is a hydroelectric dam downstream from the big bridge, which causes Peoria Lake. You can see the big warehouses of Letourneau-Westinghouse, and the Hiram Walker Brewery, and across the river, one of the big Caterpillar tractor plants. In Peoria, it is for sure someone you know works for Cat. Sometimes we take the Caddy up river road for a drive.

    Some Saturday mornings we will go to the print shop that Harley has bought into. He and his partner, Del are trying to take a rather run down little shop down on the river road back to profitability and restore it’s reputation. They do top quality work and they have sunk some money into new equipment, but the workflow is uneven and they are struggling to make the political contacts they will need to keep the union work that this shop had always done. Neither of them are really salesmen, just hard workers, but they don’t know that. I love to play in the cool red darkness of the stripping department. I like the smell of developer and ozone from the big camera. This is where you can always find Harley. This is the essence of the man, cameras and film, the dark room environment. His talent was in images. Up in the pressroom I listen to the noise and the bustle of pressmen. I watch the cutter man making little ones out of big ones.

     In the early afternoon we end up at the same place. The same several places actually. Usually it’s the Crosstown club just on the edge of the busy downtown, or the Sazerac, across the street from the print shop. But today it’s the Loading Dock out on Farmington road. Harley knows everybody at the bar. Or seems to. Or does by the time he leaves the place. It is dark and smoky within and the gray afternoon light filters in through the windows where neon beer signs blink. I get a handful of quarters. I get an orange Crush, or a Nesbitt grape, a sack of barbeque potato chips and the jukebox. The old Wurlitzer is gaudy and loud and the old men seem to nod along with the songs because in October of 1961 there is nothing on there besides Elvis they would object to. My favorites are Ring of Fire and I Walk the Line by Johnny Cash, Tie me Kangaroo down Sport, Rebel Rouser by Duane Eddy, and the Tijuana Brass, Lonely Bull and Spanish Flea. As I climb up on the barstool the guys in the back argue briefly about who’s up on the pool table and then the sounds of racking and the click of cut shots, and the rumble of the balls going down the grooves deep into the table. Above the bar is a Hamm’s beer sign where a man and a bear sit beside a neon waterfall; fish jumping, and a Budweiser sign where the Clydesdales circle endlessly around a center pivot, spotted dog riding shotgun.

   Harley drinks boilermakers. He always pours salt in his draw. Hell, he puts salt on apples, watermelon, takes salt pills- no one knows whether this is good for you in the 50’s. Or cares. John Wayne smiles down from a poster above the bar with a Lucky Strike not knowing he’s going to have a lung removed one of these days.

   Southern boys just love that Salt. Gravy. That was Harley’s passion. On my sixth birthday they had a party. Neighbor kids came, and relatives. What was left of the cake was in the old Fridgidaire. (When did we stop calling them iceboxes?) I would sleep restlessly- just a touch of the fever dreams. Midnight terrors Eve called them. I was old enough where I didn’t need to rush to her side, so I would walk about the house. Harley was a man who had odd urges in the middle of the night. I would run into him in the kitchen sometimes, standing at the open cooler door the little low watt bulb the only light on. This night he was standing there in his boxers dunking my birthday cake into the gravy boat. Hog heaven.

    At the bar time seems to stand still. My mother’s favorites are on the jukebox too- Nat King Cole sings Lazy Hazy Crazy days of summer- but this is a man thing. Sometimes dad stresses that- “ this is a thing for us guys.” I learn not to think so much of home while I’m here. I think of big streets in far away towns, of men who do nothing but sing for a living, about the horses and the beer wagon, about the cars rolling out Farmington road and that train track that the freights rumble by on, shaking the old Loading Dock as they pass-

   “Time was those would be steam whistles, boy.”

   “Yessir.”

   “My father unloaded produce from his truck garden here. There were wagons lined up all along the creek.” An old man named Whitey threw this in and pulled something from a little can in his pocket and stuck it in his mouth, toothless gums and grizzled white beard.

    I could hear those train whistles in the night, gradually growing fainter and fainter, marking every rail crossing on out the line away towards the Mississippi.

   I sometimes wondered why we were not at home, but the sights and the sounds and the smells of the tavern became comfortable to me. His father was there in a way, yet in another way was gone into the world of men which seemed to be both a wonderful, yet frightening world. I walked to the jukebox with my last quarter and played the battle of New Orleans.

    A tall, broad, bald headed man came in from the afternoon chill. It was Ivan, who ran a press at father’s print shop. He had a beard and looked like one of the wrestlers on TV. He stood at the bar and called for a boilermaker. Ivan never sat. He seemed to always be in a hurry, yet he would still be standing there when they left.

    “I just finished the first pass on that Journal Star flyer. I’ll go back it up later.”

    “No. You won’t. You’re not going back to the shop all beered up.”

    It seemed strange to hear his father telling this giant what to do.

    “Harley, don’t you go down to the Crosstown any more.”

    “No, Ivan.”

    “You ain’t gonna let a little butt kickin’ stop you?”

    Harley was half the size of this man, yet he was not afraid of him.

    “Drop it Ivan.”

      Harley thought about that night at the Crosstown. A couple of strangers he’d been drinking with had waited for him outside the bar. They had rolled him and beaten him up pretty good. He had a broken arm and had to wear an eye patch for a few weeks. The doctor though he might lose the eye at first, but the vision came back, only a little blurry.

I had been told he had fallen down, and that a piece of paper from a press had got stuck in his eye. Funny, the things you only find out about when you are a grownup, those secrets of youth.

    “Let’s go son.” We walked into the gravel parking lot, the late afternoon sun breaking out from behind the end of the front that had moved through. Slanting rays painted everything a reddish tint. The air tasted sweet after 2 hours of beer and cigarette smoke and that sour tavern smell which settles in over the years, like a film.

   The caddy rolled up Farmington hill and turned at the golf course. There were a few die hards out there on this chilly day. They would try to finish another hole in the fading light.

   We pulled in the driveway. Harley stayed in the car and fiddled with something in the glove box. The porch light was on already. I tried to dodge mothers hug- this was one of our games, but I never could, and never really wanted to. The living room was warm and there was a wonderful smell in the air. Mother had learned to cook from her mother, and she was good at it.

   “Smells like German potato salad.”

  “Very good. Such a smart boy.”

    I could hear the dogs out back in the kennel as Harley fed them. The two hunters, confined to their cage. The back door opened and father came in his face flushed and red. They did not speak, husband and wife. There was a silence that seemed to grow into something solid that you could touch, in the room.

    They sat down. They ate in silence. Sometimes you had to go to a special place when the weight was there. You couldn’t eat and not get a tummy ache if you didn’t go there. You couldn’t sit quietly and not want to cry if you didn’t go there. Sometimes though it was a hard place to come back from.

    Father finished and got up. He got a beer from the icebox.

    “Your brother called this afternoon.”

    “Woman, don’t start.”

    “You won’t talk?”

    Father walked over to the stereo. He picked up a record. It was seven years with the wrong woman, by Webb Pierce. He started to put it on.

   “Don’t do it.”

    “What? Just a little music is all.”

   “Don’t do it.”

    Mother got up. The music began a slow mournful dirge. “Seven years with the wrong woman.”

   Father started toward the door. Mother came back into the room with the gravy boat. As father started out the door the gravy boat sailed through the air, bouncing off the door just as it closed. Specks of gravy began to dry on the wall.

   The Caddy engine started. I heard the wheels spin on the gravel road. Mother began putting the supper dishes away. She wiped the gravy off the wall.

                                                                                    9.

     Ellen Erickson married a man who worked for John Deere. He was a big man from down south with a big heart and a narrow mind. They adopted 4 children. Ellen never had another natural child.

     They bought 80 acres in the country. She learned to love the land as much as her husband did.

    When she was reunited with her family there was joy. The years, which they had been apart, made closeness a real effort. They were independent, and it was hard to see how it made sense to really get to know each other and rebuild when it could be taken away again and there was this distance, anyway.

    Her father was still alive, living with a woman who was characterized as a scorpion by the family. She would not permit much contact with his children.

   Ellen took a job at a big wholesale food warehouse. She drove a forklift and did men’s work. She raised those 4 kids. They worked through a disastrous fire, which destroyed their home and every thing in it. She learned to continue withdrawing. They lived an insulated life. She would sometimes look up at St. Anthony’s orphanage and, sadly, wonder how her child was doing. Should she try to contact him?

    She waited 38 years.

                                                                                                10.

    Eve was a woman who worried a lot. That’s a symptom of caring I guess, but there is only so much you can do. I sometimes felt I was teaching her brand new ways to worry.

    She was the second child. She knew about tough times. Her father had fought in the First World War and came home to find a civil servants job, and a wife who would give him nine children. They raised those kids in a small house during the depression, learning to work together out of necessity. Eve sometimes felt she was a second mother to the smaller ones.

    What must it have been like to go to family gatherings and see brothers and sisters with large families of their own? She could not know why she had no children. So this adopted one was to be her only child

    On first communion Sunday in May of 1962, the family gathered together at Grandmothers house. 1954 had seen 5 sisters pregnant at the same time, and 1 sister applying for adoption. All these children going to the altar for the first time, the 5 girls all in white with lace veils. I wore a bow tie and mother was indignant when she saw that I was slumping in the group photo.

    “All the other children managed to stand up straight, but not you.”

   Grandma’s house was packed. The men sat on the front porch and played pinochle. Kids ran through the alley and the yard. Mother’s youngest sister Rachel had taken religious vows. She was out in the driveway on this balmy May afternoon in a black woolen habit that didn’t breathe, playing badminton with the kids. All the children flocked around her, trying for a chance to talk alone. A bride of Christ; How does a child understand that?

   I snuck into the house. Children weren’t generally supposed to be in there but grandma never minded when she saw him. In hindsight it may have been because she felt a blessing my being there at all, but I couldn’t know that, I just loved my Grandma.

    “How come you’re not out in the rough and tumble?”

    “I wanted to see if I could help, Grandma.”

    Now this was a woman who had cooked for crowds all her life. The oven was steaming away and everything was organized.

    “I’ll tell you what you do. Set the table.”

   “O.K.”

     “I remember when you were a little boy, we were at Mass at St. Marks. The priest, Father Flynn I believe it was, went on and on in Latin. You were about half asleep during the sermon. Father called on the strength of the Holy Ghost. That woke you up. You shouted, “The Holy Ghost---- where’s the ghost, dad? Where’s the ghost?”

    I liked her laugh. Grandma always had her little stories. She had her little jokes. We would often give grandma a ride out to her oldest daughters house in a little country town across the river. There was a tall radio antenna alongside the road in the middle of nowhere. Way up on the top grandma always saw a little man waving. “See, look at him. He’s waving. Wave back.” I would stare time after time. There was a speck way up there- could it be? She told a joke about a little worm who was digging in a churchyard. He got into the coffin of a black man. “Ummm. Chocolate!” She would sing her church songs to me there in the kitchen.

      “Thomas, you are God’s child, do you know that?”

       “Yes Grandma.”

       “He sent you to me.”

       “Yes.” She smiled. She knew something I didn’t.

       “Go out and tell everyone dinner is ready.”

     I went out the door and stood on the porch looking over adults and children, the whole neighborhood. Sometimes there was a feeling I was somehow removed from all this. A stranger. I knew how much I was loved, but there was something that just didn’t feel quite right.

    “Time to eat.”

    Not loud enough. But uncle Walt heard. He was always ready to eat.

     “Come and get it!” that booming voice. I held mother’s hand as we found a place in line.

                                                                        11.

    Harley wakes up in a cheap motel room in Miami, Florida. It is two days before Christmas. The floor is littered with cans and bottles. His aluminum siding samples lay in a heap by the door. On the night stand are a pair of toy Lone ranger pearl handled pistols. He shakes his head and prepares for the hangover. Sunlight is just beginning to filter through the blinds and the street outside is showing signs of waking. What had that old man been talking about, last night. “You cannot bargain with God, Harley Raincrow.” The old man, huge he was, tall and dark and anything but handsome, He’d ordered a boiler maker, just sat down and booms out this statement. Harley started. He was standing up, maybe it was just a dream. He shook his head looked at the Kessler bottle on the dresser with two fingers left in it and picked it up.

    Harley has been out on the road since late summer. Last year at this time he and his partner lost the print shop. The work just stopped coming in. He had to file for bankruptcy. Eve’s parents took out a second mortgage on their house to loan them some money to survive.

   Harley took a job at the Blue Ribbon brewery in East Peoria. He shoveled grain out of railroad hopper cars on the night shift. One morning he had just gotten home when two men in suits were at the door.

   “Are you Harley Raincrow?”

   “Yeah.”

   “Get your coat. We’ve got some questions to ask you.”

   ‘What?”

    “Just get your coat.”

    These guys were Feds. Seems Harley had been kidding around at his print shop talking about how if things didn’t get better they would have to get some plates and start printing their own money. Now who would think someone would take him seriously? Who would think that it would be a month of cooling his heels, answering questions over and over, waiting, answering more questions- no phone calls, no one knowing where he was? A month to the day they dropped him off again at his house, no apologies no explanations. Just get out.

    Eve didn’t understand. All of this was too much for her. She had just had another miscarriage and this time she hadn’t even told Harley about it. Couldn’t of course because he had vanished. And this story of his, it didn’t seem right somehow.

    Harley made the rounds. He tried to get back on at Muirsen. It felt like begging. He would sit in the cool darkness of the Crosstown and read the paper. One afternoon at the Crosstown he overheard a conversation. A man named Lloyd Hanson was sitting on the next stool.

    “Listen Ronny. Tell him he needs the combinations. Give him all the extras. There’s another G in it for the extras.”

     Lloyd sold aluminum siding. Lloyd was slick. He drove a fancy car. He knew all the angles.

     “You need any more help?”

      “You kidding? Young guy like you, this is the perfect job. See the country. You play golf? We get on the best courses. Miami in the winter. Everybody wants this stuff. Sells itself.”

   “Sounds good.”

    “Is good. I tell ya- Harley- it is Harley, right? You could knock down 20 G a year. That’s after all the extras.”

    So here it was, 6 months later, and the road was his home. Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans. The occasional phone call home.

   There was a hard knock on the motel room door.

    “Harley. Let’s get going. Let me in.”

    Harley dragged himself up. He put on a robe and lit a choke. He fumbled with the lock. As the door opened a wave of warm, damp, ocean air pushed past Lloyd into the room.

   “Hey kid. You almost lost that fish yesterday. You had the guy ready to write a check.

You almost blew it.”

    “Guy couldn’t afford it Lloyd. What a dump.”

     “Not our problem kid.” Harley was shaving; his face in the bathroom mirror didn’t look like a kid to him. It didn’t look like much of a salesman either.

    “We’ll take my car today. We’ll meet Ronny out by Ridgewood and work that subdivision out there.”

    “I’ve got to stop at the P.O. sometime this morning.”

    “Oh yeah. You got them guns for the little tyke,”

    “Yeah.”

     “We’re meeting the wholesaler downtown tonight. I’m buyin’. He said he’ll bring some lonely little elf’s might need some Christmas cheer.”

     They headed out Bay Shore drive into a warm winter sun.

                                                                                    12.

   Funny how when you’re a kid all of the things which grownups do and the consequences of their actions are really only a blur at the far side of your consciousness. The important things for a kid are running and staying incessantly busy, reading and coloring, wandering and wondering.

    I have so many cousins. 48 of them. Some older. Some much younger. Cousins and neighbor kids alike agreed that the Greens was the place to be. The happening place. With only one child, Eve had the time to notice all these other ragamuffin children and dole out some attention.

    Take the way she made Kool Aid. The directions said, one cup of sugar. That’s what she put in. One of the neighbor kids couldn’t get enough of it. At home there were 7 brothers and sisters and his mom watered the stuff down so it tasted sour.

   My cousin Ray got to spend the night. This was a rare privilege, a sleepover. We would stay up late, listening to the sounds of the night and talking of school, baseball, how big the world was, cowboy movies. In the morning we would run to the woods along Kickapoo creek. From up by Holy Family church, south to Woodrow Wilson grade school there were 3 miles of paths and clearings, deep wooded thickets, and marshes. There were toads and hoppers in the summer, and skim ice in winter. East on the church road you came to a small bluff. From the top of this bluff, underneath a big oak you could see for many miles to the northeast. All the land that would one day be suburbia stretched off in rolling hills. I would stop at this place on my way home from school, sit, and let my mind roll away so I was not thinking about anything. I would watch a big bird I assume was a hawk, circle in the air far off across the creek valley. It was a place you had to pull yourself away from. Time had no meaning. Eve often asked what took him so long getting home.

    One summer morning we rode on bikes to this bluff above the creek. There was a trail leading down to the south, very steep and narrow. It plunged down 75 feet or so at a dizzying 45-degree angle. At the bottom was a fork where you had to have perfect timing to go shooting off left or right at a terrific rate of speed. At the V was a stand of inch thick river willows. A real tangle. We tore down that hill turning to the left or right at just the right time. We walked our bikes to the top twice to ride down again. The third time there were some kids up at the top. Two boys and 3 girls. Littler kids.

   “Is it fun to ride down?”

    “I’ll bet it is.”

    “I’m going first.”

    “No. Me!”

     One by one they took off down the hill. You couldn’t really hear the crashing noises up at the top. No one returned. Two grownups walked up the path from the street.

     “You guys seen some kids around here?”

     We exchanged a glance.

    “Um—Yeah.”

    “Where’d they go?”

   “They rode down that hill there.”

     The men started down. They had to hold on to willow saplings to keep from slipping. It was that steep.

   We sat on our bikes and listened. There was one sound that might be crying. One of the grownups said. “Jeez, they’re all tangled up in there.”

    We thought maybe we would go try another trail.

    We parked our bikes alongside the schoolyard. Neither of us had ever heard of a bike being stolen. That thinking was for another time and another place. We set off for the creek on foot, the morning bright, and the day seeming to stretch out to eternity. The creek gurgled by, deep down in its banks. They followed upstream among birdcalls and rustlings in the brush.

   Ray was leading the way. He stopped and bent over to pick something up. “Look at this.”

    I came close.

    “It’s a boomerang.” He hefted it and made throwing motions. He was the starting third baseman for the CYO A team, and had one hell of an arm. This thing was shiny and new. Covered with bright red and yellow tape, with the wood grain showing on the tips. There were only a couple of small dings on it. Who had left it out here in the middle of nowhere?

   “Let’s try it.”

   “O.K.”

     Ray leaned into it. With the trees and brush behind them the only room was out over the creek. It sailed out over the water and started to make a curve back, but it was losing steam and altitude. It landed in a puff of dust on the far bank.

    We stared in disbelief. It was not conceivable that we could get over there. There was not only some vague mystique about the other side, there were parental warnings, steep banks, and for all they knew, all manner of quicksand’s, and sinkholes in the stream.

   Ray was close to tears. “How come it didn’t come back? They’re supposed to come back?”

    I had another favorite cousin. Her name was Amanda. She could do boy things like climb trees and she knew how to find secret places in the woods. She knew how to play the game, last people on earth. In this game you are the only two people left on the planet. Never mind that you can hear cars whizzing by, and the neighbors yelling down the street. Concentration shuts all that out. We would climb high in the apple tree in Amanda’s yard (she also had six brothers and sisters but not during this game) we would plan survival strategies since there were no grownups left around, and no money if there had been. We wandered the wide world over hoping there might be just one other child out there somewhere.

   Girls somehow brought something different to the art of make believe. Heck there were all sorts of differences about them a 7 year old would notice. You might pretend to your buddies that you didn’t like girls, but it wasn’t true. There was a little girl in the second grade at Holy Family who almost made my heart stop. She had a way of smiling that made my ears red. I couldn’t know that she was a good-natured child and smiled at everyone that way. I imagined some special bond between us, unspoken. Maybe there was. Somehow words could break a spell like that. You were almost better off not talking to someone you had this idealistic idea about, because a voice would certainly dispel the image. In the winter I would watch the little girls come in from the playground searching for that smile- watching as they entered the warmth, shedding the winter coats of down, revealing those plaid parochial uniforms. I would catch sight of her. I’d watch as she kicked off her snow boots. She straightened her navy blue tights and pulled on her little oxfords. There would be a deep blush on both of her cheeks. I could not speak to her. It was not like me. I would often be told to “Stop jabbering!” With her it was like being stricken. I was dumb. Tongue tied.

    But the girls have that power. There was a red haired girl who rode the school bus in kindergarten. I would think of her red hair and pretend all the splendid things I would say and she might let me look at her as much as I wanted.; I never said a word to her. She might have lived on a different planet.

     So the real world was not what the imagined world was. Not even close. I mean it had the smell and the touch and the feelings which engulfed you and left you senseless as the conclusion occurred that one was a just a wisp of smoke, a bit of imagination. All these people existed only in my mind, my world. They had no physical being. And then of course some entity from the real world would shock or pain or pinch or jerk or startle me back to the little girl in the hallway seeming to smile.

    In second grade I had a teacher named Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. She seemed ancient, her red hair as thin as a wisp, her fingers yellowed with cigarette smoke. She seemed so far removed from my first grade teacher, a diminutive, soft-spoken nun called Sr. Bernadette, as to be from a different planet. The fact that she taught at a parochial school seemed to have no particular significance to her. She had done this a certain way for so long that it was ingrained in her. Stepping outside the lines was not done.

    I could not sit still in her class. I was told incessantly to go back to my seat. I would draw when I was supposed to be writing. I would talk when I was supposed to be silent, clam up when I was expected to respond. This type of misbehavior was entirely foreign to me. I had no idea why it was occurring; something about this woman brought these things out in me. This was a battle of wills. I was in way over my head.

   On the Peoria archdiocese report card there was a section for conduct. The teacher marked it S for satisfactory or U for unsatisfactory. You had to really be out of line to get a U. I doubt Sister Bernadette had ever given anyone a U. When the last quarter report cards came out I opened mine with a trace of fear. There it was. A U. I panicked. On my way home I took the back alley. I took a little stubby pencil out of my pocket, and placing the report card on my knee changed the grade to an A by arcing a line over the top of the U. It looked bad. She had filled it out in pen. It was an obvious forgery. They didn’t give A’s for conduct anyway. Too late. He was committed. Maybe they wouldn’t notice. Maybe…. Dreamer. I knew this was foolish optimism.

    I slipped in the back door and laid my books and coat on the table.

     Eve was starting supper. “Dad will be a little late tonight. I’m making your favorite, Meat Loaf.”

    Ouch that hurt. Maybe I didn’t have to show her tonight. Hide it till tomorrow, that’s the ticket.

     “Isn’t this report card day?”

     “Umm.”

    “What? What was that?”

    “Yes.”

    “Well.”

    “Well what?”

     “Let’s see it.”

      “It’s on the table.”

     Eve picked up the little envelope. Suddenly she looked like a stranger to me. A tall alien stranger who was here to invade my world. She pursed her lips, her long hair drawn up into a bun, her flowered apron loosely tied as she stood and read. “Well… well. Very good.” But she didn’t look like she thought it was very good. She looked like she had eaten something bad. There were little furrowed lines on her forehead. “This A in conduct. I didn’t know they gave A’s. You must have behaved extra well.”

    “Yeah. I guess so. Huh, huh.”

    “Thomas Francis, why does this A look so different?”

    Thomas Francis. Not a good sign. You only got called your full name when there was trouble coming. “Looks O.K. to me.”

    “No. Not O.K. Did you change this?”

    “Well.”

     “Don’t lie to me. That’s something I cannot bear. This is not like you.”

     “I changed it.”

     “Wait till your father comes home. Go to your room.”

     I slowly climbed the stairs and time ground down to a near halt. This was the worst kind of waiting. Out in the world the sun started slipping toward the horizon, the neighborhood dogs still barked, the cars still ran up and down the main road; but something had changed.

   When it was almost dark dad pulled into the driveway. I could hear him come up the front stairs and open the door. My parent’s voices were a low mumble.

   “Thomas, come down here,”

   His dad was standing in a gray suit looking impossibly tall. He said. “How can you lie to your mother?”

    He began taking his belt off. “Lean over that chair.” This had never happened before. Did he mean it?

   The belt whistled through the air. Maybe ten times. I clenched my teeth and took it. I didn’t cry. I looked at my father’s face. Harley had no taste for this. It never happened again. The whipping or the lie.

    I took the signed report card back to school on Monday. Mrs. Murphy had a little transistor radio on her desk. “Children, this morning for history we will listen to a live broadcast from Cape Canaveral- does any one know where that is? Johnny- Yes. Right. Florida. Project Mercury is launching a man into orbit this morning. We can all learn something from this.”

    We loved the days in school when we got a glimpse of the outside world. Sometimes the maintenance man Tony would be in the classroom setting up the projector when they got there. That meant a film, and any film would do. We liked any departure from the ordinary.

    I tried to sit still and work these days. I didn’t want another bad mark. The afternoon came and dragged along. Mrs. Murphy rose from behind her desk. “We will be taking the Illinois state vocabulary exams tomorrow. I can’t tell you how to study for them. Just read. Think words.”

     I didn’t need any encouragement to read. I took books home from the little school library each week. I ran to school the next morning looking forward to the test. I loved words. They were fun. I finished before the others. What was hard about that?

I turned the test in and began looking out the window and letting my mind run.

    I didn’t really want to, but I began thinking of the dreams I’d been having. They came back again and again. In the first one, I was in the alley in back of the house. It was late at night and the wind blew through the trees. Strange night birds cawed up high, and along the fence behind the neighbors yard I came upon a big mound of dirt. From this mound a grating noise came and a hand began to work it’s way out of the dirt. Lightning begins to flash and a grotesque creature in black, torn clothing rises from the mound. In the dream I begin to run blindly through the dark. I awake in a sweat. This dream is in black and white and I almost always dream in color.

      In the next recurring dream the color pops back on just like in the Wizard of Oz. Of course at this time I do not know this happens because I’ve only watched it on black and white TV’s. This time I am in an automobile. The road goes on forever. All night long, endlessly, the car drones along highways where a tunnel of light from the high beams is all you can see. There are signs along the way leading to a town- a vague town, which as day approaches is getting nearer. Just as you catch sight of the glow on the horizon you wake up. I think maybe this dream comes from the trips back and forth to Omaha to visit my father’s family. Dad likes to drive at night. There are long stretches of pitch black and then a tiny town with rows of combines and a few street lamps. This is before the days of the Interstate. Narrow two lane brick and blacktop. I am in the back seat, nauseous from riding 400 miles with 2 chain smokers and the windows down. Mother says, “Oh he’s carsick again.” Carsick, Hell, I’m asphyxiating. That is eternity.

    In the last recurring dream my father is calling out from Purgatory where he waits to join the rest of his family already in heaven. Purgatory looks a lot like earth. There is a sense of helplessness. I recognize some of the other residents there in Purgatory. They look like some of the guys from the Loading Dock. In first grade catechism there was a picture of Purgatory. The place in my dream was nothing like that. On the same page was a picture of Saint Michael the Archangel, a confidant look on his face, sword raised high with his foot on the neck of a dirty man. .

     “We’ll have the results of the test next week. Thank you. Be careful, have a nice evening. Study pages 101 through 107 in your Arithmetic tonight.”

     The next Friday afternoon Mrs. Murphy stood up before the class. “You all did well. I’m very pleased with you all. One of your classmates got 100% on the test. That happens very rarely.”

     At the end of the day I summoned up some courage and waited till all the other children had left. I walked up to Mrs. Murphy’s desk.

   “Mrs. Murphy, who had the 100?”

   “I guess I can tell you Thomas. You did. Try not to tell everyone though, all right?”

    I couldn’t say for sure but that looked like a smile on the face of this old adversary. What was it about this grownup that made him anxious, that made him feel small and unable to do things well? I was to encounter this personality again and again in my life, the authority figure that was so sure of dominance they seemed to suck all the air out of a room.

    I ran home to tell Eve this news.

    Summer came with its lazy skies, motionless, like daydreams. Late in the afternoon thunderclouds would roll in, washing the streets of the town. I loved the smell of the wet asphalt. The dirt street in front of the house was to be paved, and another crew was running a big water pipe up the back alley. The house was surrounded by workers.

    Mother and I grew very close that summer. We would walk to the store together. As we walked, we would sing harmony. We sang; you are my sunshine. We would stop at the big new bowling alley down on Forest Hills and order the roast beef sandwich.

      That summer there was a knock on the front door. Eve would take me by the hand and go into the back bedroom.

    She whispered, “Now, we’ll just sit here until the man goes away. Quiet now.”

    We would sit on the floor in the darkened bedroom. The pounding would continue for a while and finally she would decide it was safe to come out.

    There was a week in the middle of the summer when the lights were out. We would light candles and sit in the flickering light, telling stories and making a game out of it.

     Mother and I would watch the workers, back and front. Dust from the road work would settle on the cabinets and bookshelves. The workers in the back alley dug a deep trench for the water pipe. After a hard rain this ditch filled up with water. I would run up the alley, jumping back and forth over the ditch. Right behind the house my foot slipped and I fell in. Splashing and flailing under the brown murky water I fought to get turned around and above water. My imagination supplied me with a very vivid image of a shark streaking its way down the canal. I panicked. I was trying to climb out of the slippery ditch with a shark at my heels as mother spotted me from the backyard. She began chuckling, and then realized her boy was having trouble dealing with this. I was shaking and dripping on the edge of the ditch, muttering about sharks when she walked up.

    “Thomas. There are no sharks in this ditch.”

    The street out front was nearly done. One bright afternoon when the high clouds were sitting still in the sky and the workers were nearly finished, mother was talking to one of the workers out by the street. They shook hands and the worker walked off, to return in a minute in his old pickup truck, which he backed into the driveway. Eve let him into the backyard and they walked up to the dog kennel. Harley’s hunters seemed to know something was happening. The man opened the gate and walked quietly saying, “There now, come on.” He caught hold of Lady’s collar and walked her to his truck, Buck following behind. Eve went into the house and came back with Harleys Browning sweet 16. The man stuck the gun case behind his seat and pulled out his wallet. He handed Eve 5 Jackson’s. The dogs were quiet as he pulled off down the street.

    September was coming; in a week school would start. I would scour the neighborhood on my bike, exploring. One overcast day I turned the corner from the schoolyard and started up the small hill towards home. There was an ambulance in the driveway, lights flashing. Two men were carrying mother in a Gurney down the front steps. She was silent, her eyes closed. The neighbor woman, Mrs. Tuttle stepped close to me and said, “She’ll be all right son. You’ll stay with us till your uncle gets here.” I felt a leaden weight in my chest. My stomach felt sour. The ambulance pulled off down the street.

    Eve packed her overnight bag and got ready to leave the hospital. Dr. Kruse came in on his rounds and stopped, peering over the spectacles that rode low on his nose at his clipboard.

    “Mrs. Raincrow, you don’t seem to be having much success with this.”

    “I know doctor.”

    “The records show this is your fifth.”

    “Yes.”

   “You will keep trying, won’t you?”

   “Yes.”

    “Then I expect we may see you again.”

   “I pray not.”

    Eve’s brother Paul was in the lobby when she came down. He took her arm as they walked to the car.

     Eve sat in the kitchen and lit a cigarette. Tom would be home from school soon. She thought of what to tell him, why she had been away. He had seen the ambulance. She had begun a string of untruths with the boy. She had told him he had been born at St. Francis hospital in Peoria. When they would drive by the place she would point to it and say, “That’s where you came from.” She would never tell him the truth. She began to believe the story herself.

    Harley wanted off the road. He was not a salesman, and the constant partying and lack of sleep was wrecking his health. He got a job at a small print shop for less money. It was enough to pay the bills, but just barely. His Cadillac was replaced by a run down gray Rambler with an ignition you used a screwdriver to start. They talked about Eve getting back on with the phone company. She took on more laundry. There was an open hostility between them. It would bubble over sometimes. One afternoon a fierce argument began. It went back and forth. Hard words were said. They did not yell. Voices were not raised. The words were icy and cutting. I stayed in my room and the tension came up the stairs like waves. I tried to read. Eve came up the steps. “Your father and I are splitting up. I want you to stay here with me. He wants to take you with him.” She sat with tear stained eyes, a lost look in them. Harley came in. He knelt by the side of the bed. “You can come with me.” They left the room. They came back, one, then the other. I changed my mind time and again. It seemed the whole afternoon it went back and forth. I watched the afternoon shadows lengthen, heard the sounds of the world going on outside. I felt that old dark presence try to enter the room; saw a shadow at the window. It tried to press its dark weight. What kept it away here? I had some power against it now. Where did the power come from?

   It grew silent. I couldn’t breathe. The uneasy feeling wouldn’t leave. I got up and stood at the head of the stairs. What went on down there? I worked my way slowly down the stairs. From the hallway I could see them. Father was pulling on his topcoat shaking his head. Mother was whispering something to him as he opened the front door. He stood on the porch holding the heavy door open. She stood back- silently weeping. Harley turned his back and slammed the door just as she began to reach out for him. Her thumb was crushed in the doorjamb as she heard the car engine turn over. She wrapped the thumb in her apron as her face started to turn ash white. Crimson stained through the cloth. “Tom. Run next door and get Mrs. Archer.”

   It never did heal right; that thumb. Twisted all the rest of her days. A reminder. Harley did come back. He felt terrible when he found out what had happened. Still, he never could stand to stay very long. Something between them would start to push him away. He and Eve were a long way from knowing how to heal their hearts.

                                                                13?

   The television was always on. Except when the radio was on. Or the stereo. Background noise I guess, early in the morning, until late at night. I never remember the house when it was quiet. When I got up and went downstairs I would ask to turn on Captain Kangaroo. Mom would be watching Arthur Godfrey. In t.v. land they talked and talked, and then Arthur would play his little bitty guitar, which was nothing like the cool Roy Rogers guitar I had. The high point of the Captains show was when he got rained on by ping-pong balls. He was big on books that had won the Caldecott medal. In spite of being a little whacked out from that constant barrage of ping-pong balls the Captain was really pretty cool. One morning I came downstairs to watch my show and there were a bunch of men around the dining room table. They were playing cards in the gray early morning light. The room was full of cigarette smoke and the reek of whiskey. They looked at me but no one spoke. They were very quiet. I poured some milk and watched my show, shutting them out of my mind.

                                                            14

    My mom’s brother Gene was the family cut up. He would call the cousins in the evening and tell them he was the school principal. “I’ve heard about you, Tom Raincrow. You need to shape up.” This disembodied voice of authority that could reach out into your home for discipline’s sake. Terrible. At the big family picnics in Dettweiler park uncle Gene would entertain a crowd of children with his stories. “I know some of you children,” he seemed to nod toward me, “might be thinking about climbing that hill over there.” There was a steep path worn to dirt with climbing, which went up into the wood. Brush and trees screened the top. “There is a bear that lives at the top of that hill. Why just the other day he ate a little boy up there.” I could never bring myself to go all the way up. Gene seemed to be the one Eve could talk to about her life.

     One night the three of us, Harley, Eve and I went out to dinner. Harley drove to a restaurant out in the country, the Shady Acres. He ordered a drink. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. I say that as a small person. I could not know their stories. I was content if they were behaving. Eve picked at her food. Harley said,” You eat like a bird.”

Just then a turkey began to cackle. I don’t know if it was out in the yard, or back in the kitchen. We laughed. Harley had another drink as the food arrived.

    I know people who grew up in large families who never remember going to restaurants as kids. Or if they did it was a rare occasion. Since there was only one of me, we were pretty free about dining out. They would give me a menu and tell me to get what I liked. Was I spoiled? I suppose. The kids at school with the big families said so. I would hear statements, which were delivered like facts, and I would believe them. I knew nothing of credibility. I gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. Was I gullible? Too trusting, I suppose. The trouble with that is, when you finally realize that there are people in the world who have no interest in the truth, you tend to veer off toward cynicism. You can spend years; decades even, on a bipolar roller coaster.

     After we ate we drove back into town. Harley drove across the river into East Peoria. This was always the rough end of town. The bars stayed open till 4 in the morning. Back in the 30’s and 40’s the gangsters from Chicago would use East Peoria as a place to hide out when the heat was on. There were people out walking the sidewalks on this warm summer night. Harley parked the car.

     “What are you doing?’ Eve asked.

     “I thought we’d go in the Sazarac for a drink.”

     “We can’t take a child in there.”

     “Why not?”

     Eve got out of the car and opened the back door. “Come here Thomas.”

     I got out and stood on the sidewalk. That sour feeling in my stomach started. The fried Shrimp, and the French fries, and the salad with the Thousand Island dressing (How come it always tastes better in a restaurant?) started to churn down there.

    “Are you going to take us out of here.”

    “After I’ve had my drink. Maybe.”

     She grabbed my hand. We started walking down the street. There was a pay phone on the corner. We stood and watched the people pass. We could see dad’s car at the end of the block. He was gone. No one spoke to us. People passed with their eyes straight ahead, their thoughts on something far removed from a woman and a child on this dingy street.

    A car pulled up. A very tall man slid easily out from behind the wheel and stood looking at us, adjusting his hat. He smoothed down the front of his suit, a toothpick dangling from his mouth. He walked around to the other door. The windows were so dark you could not see inside. He opened it. A woman got out, very unsteady on her feet. She wore bright clothes and looked around her like she did not know where she was.

   “Git on to work.” She stared at him uncomprehending.

   “Git.”

   She walked off down the sidewalk. The neon flashed on her sequins. The man looked at us again. That cold feeling came back to my insides. He looked at my mother and winked. Then he got back in his car.

    We waited again. I looked in the store windows and listened to a loud jukebox in the juke joint across the street. Eve kept looking down the block towards their car. We heard a horn. It was uncle Gene.

    “Get in.” He called, his car double-parked and traffic backing up behind it. I jumped in the back and mother sat up front.

       Dad shot a hole in one at Newman golf course. We were celebrating. Dad and his friends were in the living room. Mom and I took the Rambler out to Sheridan Village

shopping center. This was the first mall I had ever seen.

      “We’ll look in at the trophy place and then I’m going to get a hairstyle.”

     All these stores. This was big. They were onto something here. We walked and walked. We stopped at the hairdresser. I sat in the foyer with a Boys Life magazine. I was in the Cub scouts.

    Eve was in the corner in a big tilted chair with a big dryer on her head. She was covered with a big table cloth.

     I was lost in the words. “Well..... what do you think.”

      I looked up. Who was this? This haircut might look fine on Shirley McClaine but not on my mom.

     “Ahhh..” I started sobbing. I know a nine year old is not supposed to cry. I couldn’t help it. She had just turned 40 and had decided that long braids were a young woman’s look. How could I know that. There was no age involved in the way I loved Eve. She was timeless. She transcended fashion. She was mine. I had had her to myself for so long. Why change?

      No this wouldn’t do. This was not acceptable.

      But what good did anger do?

      The hair was irretrievable. Gone. My tears were useless. It fell into the file of things I could do nothing about. This file grows all our lives. We rail and cajole in rebellion and then learn it is inevitable. We cannot facilitate change by emotion. We are prisoners of fate.

     We drove home. The day had gone steely gray. The celebrants were still in the living room. Mom gave dad a hole in one trophy. Dad stood up. “Well....Thanks hon.” A pause. “Hey, I like your hair.” Mom beamed. I’m shattered and he throws off a compliment.

    He left again. I don’t remember knowing where he was this time. I had to ask myself, “Did I miss him when he was gone?” I did.. What was a kid to do? He became a vague presence in my mind and heart, that would not solidify, strangely even when he did come home.

      Eve and I would pile into an old flatbed truck that Harley had procured somehow. At this time it was the only vehicle around. I thought it was cool but I know Eve had a hell of a time driving it. We would take it to the Saturday night pops concerts at Glen Oak park. We would wait till all the traffic left at the end so we wouldn’t have to maneuver through all that. I loved the sounds of horns and strings wafting out on the summer breeze along the lake and the ballfields over the swings and the slides, over the swimming pool and the oak groves that covered the river bluffs.

      We went with uncle Gene to the drive in theater. I sat in the back seat with candy and popcorn. The movie was set in the Florida Everglades with swamps and gators and brightly colored tropical birds. The adults in the film were discussing something; the adults in the car were discussing something; I just wanted something exciting to happen.

     “He’ll be back.”

      “I’m sure he will. You’re not going with him, are you?”

       The scene shifted to a boat with a huge propellor mounted in a cage, racing through the sea of grass which apparently was really floating. Sort of a water posse, I gathered, packing iron, and looking for trouble.

      “I don’t know.”

      That summer I was playing ball for the Mid State Terrazzo and Tile Tigers. I was an indifferent ballplayer, relegated to left field because there was not a lot of action there and the coach knew I couldn’t be relied on to keep my head in the game all the time, and that was what was needed.. I was only playing because I was a decent hitter. I liked to plop these soft line drives just over the shortstop’s head.

     So, most of the action was distant and I could watch the traffic on Gale, see the kids over at the Tasty Cream with their melty soft serve Ice Cream, watch the birds and kick the dandelion heads so the tiny parachutes would blow off to where the small crowd of people were paying attention to the game. There were runners on second and third.

     At the crack of the bat I would come back to the game and watch the peoples faces to see where they were tracking the ball. If they were looking out towards me, I was in trouble.

    They were looking at me and I could tell the ball was still up in the air somewhere, a high fly. The sun was not directly in my eyes but there was a little glare and I started searching that immense dome over me for a tiny fast moving object. I thought, “Maybe I should run. Somewhere.” But I didn’t know which direction. I started backpedaling because I thought, “If it’s in front of me surely it would have fallen out of the sky by now.”

     I felt a whisper of wind and heard the thump right beside me, saw the little puff of dust as the ball hit and bounced, just behind me. The figures up by home plate, the backstop and in the bleachers were yelling at me and the runners were rounding the bases. I picked up the old apple and fired it home. My arm was so-so but this was not a difficult throw. The ball appeared to arrive in the catchers glove after the second bounce and he narrowly missed tagging the guy from second. The batter stood on third. I believe this is what I saw. It was sort of fuzzy.

      Eve asked me, “Must you sit so close to the tv?” My teachers moved me to the front row in class so I could see the blackboard. Something goofy was going on with my eyes.

      That Autumn, 1963, my fourth grade class moved to the big playground for recess for the first time. We were with the big kids now. We went to lunch in the cafeteria with the big kids, too. I remember the hamburger gravy on mashed potatoes tasting better somehow than it has ever tasted since. I tried to figure out what they did differently, tried to duplicate it when I got older, and gave up, realizing that it was a thing from a time and place that could never be duplicated.

    I learned that about change. I would experience something so out of the ordinary, so moving; that I would try to recreate it. The next day, perhaps. Same place, same faces. Different. I would sing a song with Eve and the next day, we would sing it differently, somehow. I wanted the same rush, the same buzz, the same emotions again, and again. How could it be different? Why can’t it be the same? Why can’t I make it the same?

     I hated it. I hated my weakness. Somehow a person should be able to alter their own experiences. Shouldn’t they? To be at the mercy of extenuating circumstances. Not fair. Not right.

    Just change. Just life.

     I walked the winding road to Holy Family. This November day was grey and windy. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my windbreaker. I ran part of the way. Do you remember how much you loved to run, as a kid? Or did you? I would run at any opportunity.

    I usually got to school a little before 8. Usually we started the day with Mass. I did not mind it. I liked the hymns and the incense, the bells. I began to learn a bit of Latin.

    We left chapel for class. A routine day. We kept moving at recess to stay warm. There was supposed to be a fight on the playground that day, but it never came off. The combatants reneged.

    We were in the middle of math class around 2 o’clock. I was an indifferent mathematician. I much preferred words and history and geography. Where it was and where and when it happened and how to describe it. Much better than how many divide into how many.

     The principals voice came over the intercom. “Children. We are going to dismiss school early today. The President of the United States has been shot.”

     The class stirred. There was a low murmur underneath the glances at best friends and buddies and the child in the next desk. Teacher said nothing. She sat and looked through the windows with a shocked expression.

     Out on the street the kids were quiet. We went off in our different directions and trudged silently home.

    I came over the last hill and saw a big orange U-haul trailer sitting in our driveway.

    Harley came out of the house with a cardboard box full of kitchen stuff. He stood and watched me come up the drive.

    “Are you OK, son?”

     “Yeah.”

       He loaded the box in the trailer and his brother and brother in law came across the yard with boxes. They didn’t speak. My grandmother’s boarder Dean came out next. “Thomas, good to see you. Look...” He stuck out his tongue raised his eyebrows way up high, wiggled his ears and opened his eyes so wide they looked like bug eyes. Dean had an endless supply of funny faces. He sometimes had voices to go with them. In Dean I saw how a grownup could still be a child. He seemed to fit seamlessly into my 12 year old world. That is rare in the world of grown ups. That world had changed, this day. We loved John Kennedy. We didn’t know about his personal life then, the media kept all that. My eyes looked toward Nebraska, I place I had been to, yes, but a big change. The world changes, today.

      “Tom, Grammy”s looking forward to seeing you.”

      Eve was putting her china into a bow when I came in. She had just been told there would not be room for her hi fi in the trailer.

     Harley said, “Maybe your folks would store it in their basement till we can come and get it.”

        He walked into the living room and grabbed one of the claw foot chairs.

        I watched my mother. She turned to me. “Mom, what’s going on.”

       “I told you dear.” She folded her apron neatly.

      “I don’t remember talking about this.”

       “We did. You just don’t remember. Start getting your things ready.” She bent over and put her Betty Crocker cookbook next to the Dr. Spock baby book.

       “Mom, did you hear about John Kennedy?”

        She took her cookie jar off or the top shelf. Eve was tall she could set it up there on her tiptoes. I had learned to climb that high and she knew it but it stayed our little game.

    She locked eyes with me. She was crying. I had not seen this before. She stayed tough for me.

      I went to my room. The beds were gone. There were three boxes I guessed were my allotment; a space consideration. There are times to let go of things. Looking over my collection of trophies, my toys my ball glove, my Roy Rogers guitar, the books needed to go first. Always. Not just here, in Nebraska too.

     We took the two beagles. Bonnie had showed up once when dad came back from Florida. She was the best dog I ever had. I tried to replace her. It couldn’t be done. The other dog, Chimpy, was her son. He was two. They laid down in the back of Uncle Red’s Buick. Deans chevy was in front of us. I remember crossing the Skunk river and there was the huge wide early winter sky with that burnished brightness and the sense of the huge roll of the earth, horizons endless, all through the flatness of western Illinois till you got to the big river. We crossed in Burlington in those days. The Interstate was close to completion, but still not done. It was to cross the river in my home town, the one I knew nothing about.

     I don’t remember Iowa. We crossed the Missouri at 10pm. Considering we had to stop for the dogs and all the millions of small towns we had to crawl through, not bad time. We pulled in to Grammy’s drive. She shared some of her shrimp cocktail with me and tucked me in on her sofa.