ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME
©Jo Dereske 2014Chapter 4
The Little House
Mike had built the little house forty years ago for my grandparents. There were no plans or drawings; it had evolved from images in his head, “even while he was building it,” Louise boasted. “He’s very ingenious.”
The bedroom windows – kitty-corner from each other to catch the breezes in summer – faced the orchard, the rising sun, the forest beyond and the path of the moon. Across from the bedroom was a room too small to be a bedroom, with good northern light: my grandmother’s sewing room.
In the center of the house, Mike portioned out the living room, with a wall of windows that faced the ravine, and off the front a small glassed-in porch warmed by ambient house heat. The kitchen was behind the living room, with another porch off it. Mike had installed clear oak flooring he salvaged from a defunct train depot, skillfully fitting pieces together until there were no cracks or gaps. He sanded the boards smooth and sliver-free. After all that work, a friend had said, shaking his head: “he covered it all with that god-awful linoleum to protect it.”
We were well-settled in the little house, furnishing it mainly from Louise’s antique shop. I encouraged Kipling to take the sewing room as his office, and I set up my computer in the small glassed-in front porch, where I could keep an eye on Louise and Mike’s house while I worked. The completed re-edit of my book was due to my editor New York in three weeks and I was behind in my self-imposed schedule, frankly bewildered by how long it was taking me.
1929 Mae and Phil got married at City Hall and we had a big party at Rialto afterward. I drank – oh my, did I! – but I feel better than in a long time. Crazy music. I danced until I was sick and danced some more. Ed brought me home but that’s all. I’m true to myself now. I hate men.
Slept too late and Mrs. B. banged on my door with a shoe!
I sometimes irritated people in the Northwest with my habit of peppering new acquaintances with questions to establish their background and our commonalities before I could get down to serious conversation, a compulsion that prompted one person to demand, “What is this, an inquisition?”
But here in Michigan, I realized those opening questions were as common as saying hello. Who are you related to? How do you know so-and-so? Where did you go to school? Maybe you know my brother?
Whenever we mentioned we were helping Louise and Mike, we heard stories.
“I once stopped by in the summer. The front door was open, their cars were there, but no one was around. So finally I wandered down to their gardens and found Louise and Mike sitting in the grass behind the barn, barefoot and sharing a watermelon.”
“Louise and Mike? I came across those two in the woods once, during mushroom season. You know what they were doing? Well, maybe you don’t want to.”
“Did she ever tell you about the time she – or maybe it was her sister Stella – rode a horse through the bar? In one door and out the other.”
“My dad bought whiskey from your grandfather all one winter during Prohibition,” a man in line at the bank told me, chuckling. He paused when my mouth dropped open. “Just kidding.”
While the details differed according to the teller’s memory, a common thread of bemusement wove through each tale. Many families had lived in the county for generations, and like a large muddled clan, they’d accepted they were stuck with each other and either accommodated one another’s eccentricities – or avoided certain “family” branches completely. No matter, they were always on the lookout for a good story.
1929 Heavens! I can almost go mad from lonesomeness. Haven’t heard from anyone all day. I wish something exciting would happen. Well, maybe not too exciting! I did receive letters, though. J.H. sent the song, “Happy Days and Lonely Nights.” More like Lonely Days and Lonelier Nights – hah.
Birds and Cats
My father had struggled to match Mike’s wizardry at charming the birds. It was no contest. Mike coaxed chickadees to land on his finger and feed from his palm. They rode his shoulders to the mailbox, snatching at sunflower seeds in his shirt pocket. He built a multitude of bird feeders to hang on poles and trees and the sides of buildings, all in whimsical shapes and styles, cleaned and freshly painted in bright colors each year. Chickadees, juncos, cardinals, nuthatches, woodpeckers, finches, grosbeaks, orioles, waxwings, and of course the pesky blue jays: they all fed at his feeders.
But now the feeders leaned into the weather, capped with snow, grayed and empty. One day I saw Kipling, who fed the birds during our mild winters in Washington, circling the birdfeeders, eyeing them with a thoughtful expression.
Mike, who’d grown suspicious of nearly everyone except Louise, had taken to Kipling with surprising warmth. “Well, it’s Mr. Kip,” he often said when he saw Kipling. Kipling’s was the only name he always recalled, although usually in colorful variants: Chipling, Clip, Tipping. Or “Tipple.” The “ip” sound tickled Mike and he’d slap his leg and merrily repeat his permutations to himself.
Kipling hesitated to repair the birdfeeders outside the windows of the main house. Whether he liked Kipling or not, Mike felt unsettled by our presence, quick to stand threateningly at the door of the breezeway when he spotted us outside, sometimes shouting, “What do you think you’re doing?” – prepared to defend his property.
We were an interruption, an invasion, a great unknown alteration in their lives, disruptive to their routines no matter how welcome we were. One or the other often sat by the living room windows watching the little house like sentinels, waiting suspiciously to see what trick we’d pull next.
“Do you feed the birds anymore?” I asked Mike, hoping to gently introduce the subject.
“I don’t know if I do or not.”
“He’s not interested in the birds,” Louise interjected. “He’s not interested in anything.”
One by one, after Mike was asleep and their house was dark, Kipling pulled down a bird feeder in their yard and repaired it in what he called his “midnight carpentry shop.” When all seven that could be seen from their living room were refurbished and rehung, Kipling poured in sunflower seeds before Mike and Louise awakened. No birds came that first day and neither one noticed the restored feeders.
On the afternoon of the second day, two chickadees pecked nervously at one of the feeders. If Mike saw the active little birds, he didn’t acknowledge them. On the third afternoon, when I brought over fresh laundry, Mike sat on the edge of his chair close to the window, his face the most animated I’d seen since our arrival.
He was too excited to speak an intelligible word. He waved toward the window, nodding his head, taking his glasses on and off and wiping the lenses with his fingers. On the closest feeder a junco and a chickadee fussed at each other, fighting over their perch. Mike laughed. “Little bastards,” he finally sputtered, clearly in delight.
All day he sat in the living room intently watching birds come and go. We bought a clear plastic feeder with suction cups and adhered it to the window near his favorite chair and it too was soon being clamored over by the smaller birds.
Long stretches of Mike’s days were spent at the windows. He never attempted to fill the feeders, and Kipling continued to do so before Mike woke up or after dark. “We’re going through twenty-five pounds of sunflower seeds a week,” Kipling said in surprise.
“You could buy the mixed seeds,” I suggested. “They’re cheaper.”
“The birds like the sunflower seeds.” And so he continued buying pure sunflower seeds, our twenty-five pounds a week inching upward toward fifty.
When too many of the unruly blue jays hogged the seeds, Mike banged on the windows or rushed to the door, sometimes becoming so excited he bolted through the wrong door and deadended in the bathroom or the pantry.
We learned to brush the snow off suspicious humps in the yard, because Mike was liable to grab whatever was closest, a pillow, the phone book, his slipper, once a frying pan, and open the door to hurl it at the jays. They squawked and flapped away, then relighted a few minutes later.
And always, keeping to the periphery skulked Morris, the big yellow tom cat.
“Morris has been on this farm ever since he was a little kitten,” Louise told me, “since 1947.”
That would make Morris the world’s oldest living cat.
Morris was an outdoor cat, shameless in his affection. He rolled onto his back at the feet of whoever walked past. He balanced on the two-inch railing outside the porch window where I’d set up my computer and watched me work, his rumbling purr audible through the glass. Morris was not a house cat, but sometimes Kipling brought him inside for a few hours and Morris stuck by him as if he couldn’t trust his good luck.
One morning Louise asked, “Have you seen Morris?”
“No,” I told her, and before I could say another word, her face collapsed.
“He’s dead,” she said. “I knew it.”
“No, no,” I assured her. “I just haven’t seen him yet this morning.”
“Because he died.” And she began to sob, the tears sliding freely down her face. Each time I tried to reassure her, she cut me off. “I know he’s dead. He was the best cat we ever had.” Her crying grew louder, her shoulders shook.
Finally, I hurried back to the little house and begged Kipling to search for Morris and bring him to see Louise.
Ten minutes later, he walked through Louise’s door, announcing, “Look who I found.” Morris sat perched on his shoulder, gloomily gazing around the kitchen, as if he’d been interrupted during vital cat business.
Mike reached a hand toward Morris. “Why, it’s our old Thomas,” he said in pleasure and wonderment. Louise shed new tears at seeing Morris alive and well. She cradled him on her lap and related a few Morris stories. In one of them Morris – or perhaps an earlier Morris – managed to chase a big fox squirrel around the yard until he finally caught and killed it.
“That’s pretty good for an old cat,” she said proudly a she rubbed Morris’s ears.
Mike thought for a moment and suggested, “Maybe it was an old squirrel.”
I asked if they’d ever owned a cat named Thomas, and she emphatically said no, Morris had always been their only cat.
1929 Vince called last night. I asked him where my money was and hung up on him. I have such a terrible headache today. J.W. was here. He brought me writing paper from Monkey Ward. But I don’t want any men now. Not ever. I worked so hard for Mrs. B today.
By the light of dawn on my way to Louise’s I was startled by a rustling and flash of blue in the snow between the little house and main house.
In the soft snow, a foot off the path, a blue jay had settled as if it had crash-landed, its wings spread wide. Its black eyes gazed up at me. It wasn’t struggling, didn’t seem frightened, only watchful.
Up close, its sky blue feathers were dense, strokeable, its outspread wings like clever pleated cloth that exposed alternate colors when they opened.
I carried groceries in my arms and reluctantly left the jay where it sat, intending to rescue it after I made coffee for Louise and Mike and put away groceries.
I hurried, considering whether to sneak around the bird to summon Kipling first or whether to try to lift it into a box and take it home. With a start, I remembered Morris and abandoned the groceries to rescue the jay, leaving my jacket behind. What if Morris found the jay first?
When I rushed to the path, a box in hand to tuck the blue jay into, the bird was gone. There was no sign of a struggle so at least Morris hadn’t pounced on it. Only sweeping marks remained in the snow as if the tiniest child had lain down and spread its arms to create a snow angel.
Kipling noticed deer tracks in the old snow-covered garden space where we threw our vegetable and fruit scraps so he began buying apples to leave in the garden as gifts for the deer. Uncle Mike watched him toss apples onto the ground and shook his head. “Not the garden,” he warned me with irritated clarity. “Don’t bring them into the garden.” What did it matter, we wondered. Nothing grew there in the middle of winter.
1929 Met Bill L. at Mae and Phil’s and just like that I fell for him. Went to the Capital and saw “The Terror.” He’s different from other fellows. I’ve been thinking about him all day long. He’s handsome, and how! Dapper with twinkly eyes. A gentleman. He’s a Dutchman, really swell. Almost P.H.I. Still have hope.
I have to find a new job. Mrs. B is like the movie: a terror.
Lull before . . .
We’d been living in the little house for three weeks, companionably helping Louise and Mike when the honeymoon ended.
“My darling godchild,” Aunt Louise greeted me in Lithuanian each time she saw me. She loved to retell the story of how my father asked Stella, his and Louise’s sister, the family favorite, to be my godmother, but at the party held before my baptism, Stella celebrated too much and passed out, leaving Louise to pinch hit as my godmother. “He should have asked me in the first place,” she ended each retelling.
“Myliu teva,” she said when I left. I love you.
Whatever I did amazed and delighted her. My coffee was the richest she’d ever tasted. I was excellent company. I had an infectious laugh.
We sat companionably together while our coffee cooled, while day turned to darkness, talking. Aunt Louise told me story after story, of her youth, of my grandparents, Lithuanian folktales and tales of immigration. It didn’t matter that her accounts were repeated, sometimes twice during the same cup of coffee. Her stories were funny, intimate, when I forgot we were actually generations apart.
There were stories she didn’t tell, that I’d only heard when my father was alive, and those were often secondhand to him because he was twelve years younger. Louise was a woman with secrets, a child of Lithuanian immigrants who’d grown up on a Michigan farm, and who, as a bold-eyed young woman, had moved to Chicago for several years, and then returned, but who still possessed the aura of city life. Her vocabulary was more sophisticated than the vocabularies of many people in our remote corner of rural Michigan, her tastes more worldly. In the period intervening her Michigan farm years, there’d been a suave first husband we never knew, a life in Prohibition-era Chicago, friends who’d been artists and writers and who, rumors said, lived far out on the edge.
I unashamedly squirmed in happiness at being in Louise’s good company. We had made the right decision to come back, I just knew it. She praised my cooking, exclaiming over my fresh-baked refrigerator biscuits, the juicy chicken.
“Did Kipling marry you because you’re a good cook?” she asked.
“I hope not,” I told her.
“I cooked Mike a chicken dinner with little feather biscuits and when dinner was over he asked me to marry him. Isn’t that right, Mikey?”
“That’s right,” Uncle Mike said on cue.
“You were hooked,” I said.
“I was cooked all right,” he answered.
1929 All day long I was thinking about Bill. Oh, I’m so happy I met him. I hope he can come over tomorrow night. Mrs. B is sick and in bed so there’s that much more work for me to do. I didn’t even have time to read before I fell asleep.
Next Tuesday: Chapter 5: Our presence creates strife.