The Story of My Life

As some of you know, I am pulling together 10 of my short stories to publish in a small volume, so let me try out the shortest one in the volume on you -- for your comment!
by Charlie Leck

FICTION

One time, years ago, in a dream, I turned down a date with Jane Wilder. You must remember her. She was a big Hollywood starlet. She wasn’t a sex-pot, but she was a real looker. And, she wanted to go out with me. She sent some of her people to talk to my people. My people were in favor of it. They thought it would do wonders for my career. I put a stop to the whole thing on the spot. I didn’t want to go out with Miss Wilder.

I was in love with Nancy Thurlbinger. I had been since the 4th grade. I told her so, too. We were on the playground behind the public school and she was climbing on one of the contraptions set up for such activity. I wandered over to where she was stretching her arms and legs to move her delightful body from one square of iron to another.

“You know,” I said to her, as she awkwardly moved across the bars, “I am in love with you.”

She giggled and jumped down from the climber. It was too great a distance for her and she tumbled over when she hit ground and must have hurt herself. She rose, crying, and scurried off toward our teacher.

I was asked, by Miss Dablowski, our teacher, to stay following dismissal that day. I received a very stern lecture from the old woman about not doing such things. It turns out that I was accused of frightening Nancy so severely that she jumped from the jungle bars in utter fear and sprained her ankle quite seriously. I wanted to tell Miss Dablowski about Nancy’s little giggle and argue that it hadn’t sounded like fear to me, but I did not. I was so relieved to hear that my parents would not be told of the incident, that I cut my losses and kept my mouth shut – something I have not been entirely good at for the ensuing 55 years.

Never again did I tell Nancy Thurlbinger that I loved her; though I always have over these many years. It is the story of my life.

I watched her quite stealthfully over the ensuing eight years of school we had together. I don’t believe she ever realized I was watching her so carefully. I was pretty good at concealment.

Her hair grew longer and she began to decorate it with curls and ribbons. I remember the first day that she wore lipstick. I can also call to mind that day when I first noticed that she had breasts that caused a little, gentle ripple in the front of her dress. I found myself staring at them, but I don’t think she or anyone else ever noticed how my eyes were locked on her chest.

People didn’t often take notice of me. I was pretty well ignored. I should say, to be more factual, that I was completely ignored.

It was quite odd to arrive in my fifth grade classroom, walking randomly into it with a small group of boys onto whom I had simply and silently attached myself, and have the teacher offer greeting to each one of them and, yet, not mention my name.

“Lynn, David, Edward… hello boys and good morning. Please take your seats! You, too, Raymond and Teddy.”

My name is William, but I have barely ever heard it in my life. It wasn’t only my fifth grade teacher who ignored me, but so did my classmates and all the subsequent teachers in the classrooms in which I studied over the next 16 years.

Occasionally I would be addressed as “Hey, you!” However, most of the time, I was simply ignored and not spoken to at all. It is the story of my life.

On the day of my graduation from high school, during the commencement ceremony, I could feel the deep sense of shock that swept across my classmates and teachers when the principal, read my name aloud from the list that was before him at the podium.

“William Journal Outrighter?”

His emphasis was on the question mark, indicating his surprise that this was my name or, perhaps, it was some curiosity about who in the world this person might be.

Nancy Thurlbinger’s name was called near the end of the ceremony and she crossed the stage to receive her diploma. I sat in my chair, wedged between two classmates whose family names also began with the letter “O” and I watched as Nancy walked toward the principal. Her breasts were swollen in size now and they were the most attractive knockers in our class.

That was fifty years ago. That was the last time I ever saw Nancy Thurlbinger.

And now I hold in my hand this invitation to the 50th reunion of our high school graduating class. Among the names of the Reunion Committee is hers, Nancy (Thurlbinger) Hammonholder.

Though I have not had a single contact with any single student from my graduating class in these fifty years, I am not surprised that they have found me and contacted me; for I still live in the same house, at the same address, that I lived in on the day of our commencement. When my mother and father died, I simply moved into their larger bedroom and here I am yet today.

I stared at Nancy Thurlbinger’s new lastname – Hammonholder. It was a name with which I was famililar. Mr. Jacob T. Hammonholder, was the Chief Executive Officer of the Four Square Bank of New York, the largest and most profitable bank in all the world and in which I had begun investing in 1959. I wondered if Nancy could possibly be married to that Hammonholder.

Faithfully, each year from 1959 until this current one, I have invested whatever funds I could manage not to spend during the year in the Four Square Bank of New York. In some of those early years it only amounted to $500 or so. After a few years it became $2,000 or so. Eventually, since I had not rent to pay and had risen to a supervisor at the county home for unadopted, orphan boys, the sum grew to a number of thousands of dollars. I have never withdrawn a cent from those invested funds and absolutely paid no attention to their growth. That is the story of my life.

I turned the invitation over and looked at the list of addresses to which we could reply about our intentions to attend. Yes! There it was. Nancy was indeed Mrs. Jacob T. Hammonholder.

I rose and went to my father’s old desk in the back hallway, just next to the door that led to the stairway down to the cellar. From a drawer I took the most recent statement that had just arrived from the Four Square Bank. I flipped through several pages and found the bottom line number in which I had never shown any previous interest.

$21,089,764.21

My!

This home of my parents is paid for. I spend very little taking care of it. I’ve never eaten glamorously. I have no hobbies on which I spend money. My favorite activity is reading and I pay an annual fee of $26 to the library to keep up my membership. All my books come from and are returned to the library’s shelves. I now receive over $800 per month in my social security check and I find I can easily live on that amount. My pension from the county exceeds $20,000 each year and I have always spent that immediately on the purchase of shares in the Four Square Bank of New York.

I sat down at my father’s desk and turned on the little reading lamp that sat upon it. I pulled a little piece of scrap paper from the cubical in which I kept such things to use as notepaper. I scribbled a note, as neatly as I could, to Mrs. Jacob T. Hammonholder, accepting the invitation to attend the reunion of the Ratsford High School graduating class of 1958. I signed it, without flourish, from William Journal Outrighter. I folded three twenty dollar bills, to cover the cost of the dinner, into the note paper and pushed it all into an envelope and addressed it to Mrs. Jacob T. Hammonholder at 1180 Park Avenue, New York City. I proudly wrote out the return address – the only address I had ever known as mine – 20 Hillside Avenue, Ratsford, New Jersey. I placed a current stamp in the corner of the envelope and sat looking at the product of my elderly, shaky hand.

I rose and walked the letter to the post office in the center of downtown. As I walked, I brought clearly back to mind the vision of Nancy Thurlbinger, walking across the platform to receive her high school diploma, with her large breasts bouncing joyfully as she walked. In fact, I have never in my life seen a woman's naked breasts. That is the story of my life.

The reunion will take place in the building that was our high school. It is now an elementary school. It is exactly eight and four-tenths miles from the house in which I live. I intend to purchase a new car -- a big, black sedan by Cadillac -- and since I do not have a driver’s licence, I shall hire a professional driver to take me places in it. Certainly, I will expect him to drive me to my class reunion. Even though none of my classmates will remember me or recognize my name, I shall enter proudly. When I reintroduce myself to Nancy Thurlbinger – now Mrs. Jacob T. Hammonholder – I will ask her if she remembers the day she fell off the climbing contraption that stood on the playground of our elementary school because I told her I loved her.

If she looks at me oddly and runs away, crying hysterically, I will only concede that this also is the story of my life.

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“My Love is Great!”

“My love is great! It is greater than my anger!”
by Charlie Leck

I’ve heard some of history’s greatest preachers. I’m not talking about Billy Graham and the like. I’m talking about really great preachers who made sense and said important and relevant things to people hungry to hear the word in a sensible, intelligent way (such as William Sloan Coffin).

So, now I send you to listen to a little girl. I need to guess her age. Probably 9 or 10. Listen to her tell the story of Jonah. It’s never been told better and you will not be sorry for the 7 or 8 minutes you give her.

Don’t give up on her early. Give her room! Give her the entire time and you will likely stand up and cheer as I did.

Jesus gathered the little children around him and then said to those who were nearby: “Of such is the Kingdom of God!”

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Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Life is Good

It is autumn in Minnesota and I love to feel the chilled air in my nostrils.
by Charlie Leck

The Minnesota evenings have on them that lovely chill we so expect and cherish here. One seems to breathe more joyfully and carry on with such energy at this time of year.

Visitors arrived from France early last evening, at a delightfully crepuscular moment. I wish I could have painted the way the darkening sky hovered over us and how the trees, bare of their leaves, looked against it. The visitors brought with them that special joie de vivre that the French are so good at! They gazed about in wonder at the rolling land beneath the dark, autumn sky and they spread their arms in wonder at it, laughing and almost cheering.

My memory captures ambrosial moments like this as surely as a camera lens and won’t release them – ever!

I was in a particularly good mood anyway, because a message had arrived from Colorado that our dear friend, Lisa, had received her kidney donation from the saintly Sarah. (See yesterday’s blog!) Nearly three hours of surgery and then the doctor appeared with as much good news as they are willing to share: There had been no surprises and the surgery went as they had hoped it would. Now they will run their constant, important checks and monitor both of the women.

Le vie est trés bonne, non? Mais oui!

Organ transplantation was once a wonder of medicine and science. Now it is common. Mon Dieu!

Little things make life so wonderful. Yesterday, while I was scurrying around the kitchen, preparing a special dinner for these arriving guests, an old buddy called to say he missed me and thought often of me. How nice! He’s scandalously out on the right wing politically and hopelessly religious and righteous about it, but I still like him almost like a brother. I gathered energy from his call and it drove me to make the dinner very special.

“How about this truffle oil as the base for the salad dressing,” I asked myself, “and some tres cher vinegar from the grape mixed with it?”

I took a sip of the breathing wine, to test it. Ahh!

Le vin est bon!

And so, too, is life.

La vie est belle!

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Mercyside

A Short Story – Fiction
by Charlie Leck

It was a perfect summer morning in 1956, just about exactly eleven years after the war in Europe and the South Pacific had ended. Perfect means that it wasn’t particularly hot on this morning and it wasn’t raining. More precisely it was on the cool side for the end of June, just a few days short of July, and there was heavy dew on the grass there in our small New Jersey town. My old man’s little luncheonette was hopping with breakfast customers on this weekday morning. Every table was taken by its usual and standard occupants.

Ordinarily, I, 15 years old, would have been up at Pleasant Hill Farm already, getting ready for a day of making hay out there in the rolling hillsides south of the big dairy barns. The dew delayed all that, however, and work wouldn’t commence for a couple of ours now, because the mown hay needed to dry awhile before it was raked and baled.

So, I just stood up there near the entrance of our general store, thumbing through some of the magazines that the old man sold to his customers. I was probably hoping to come upon a photograph of a large busted woman with provocative eyes and an inviting smile. I was that age, you know.

Donny Mercanto’s brand new ’56 Ford was sitting in the parking area in front of the store. It was a swell looking car with a soft green and white paint job and lots of chrome. Everyone wondered how this young guy could afford such a swell set of wheels.

“Maybe it’s better if we don’t know,” my mom had said at the dinner table one night. I had some vague ideas about what she might have meant. Donny had uncles who lived in the Bronx. They came out here into the country to visit the Mercanto household once in a while. They drove big, long and dark colored Cadillacs and they always wore ill-fitting suits, even in the hottest weather. My little town wasn’t a suit kind of place. Only the two preachers, from the Congregational and Presbyterian Churches, wore suits and ties, even in the summertime.

Fred Thompson was walking along the narrow, gravel roadway that led up to our place from the firehouse down the street. Fred was in one of his stinking moods. It was easy to tell. It was common knowledge all around town about Fred. Sometimes a big, black cloud came and settled over him and he became a different person. His mind went off somewhere else it seemed. His eyes didn’t have any movement when he was like that. If he wanted to look off to the side, to inspect some kind of movement, he had to move his whole head in that direction. His eyes remained glued to their singularly concrete position. Instead of walking, Fred would tromp. His feet came down flatfooted and solidly, one after another in a steady, rhythmic and heavy motion.

My old man had come up beside me. He was fetching a newspaper from the counter in front of me. I suppose he was getting it so he could show old Henry Milton something about the Giants game against the Dodgers on the night before. He looked across the way and saw Fred approaching.

“He’s in one of those stinking moods this morning,” the old man warned me. “You be careful of him.”

“Why’s he get like this, Pop?”

“Hard to tell, boy. Probably the war. It was hard on some people. Some take longer than others to get over it.”

I had other questions, but the old man was heading back to the luncheonette side of the store with the New York Herald Tribune in hand. Fred had gotten as far as our front porch and he stood looking at the single step he had to take to get up on it and come in. As if it was too much for him to lift his heavy foot that far up, he turned and just sat down on the porch instead. He stared directly into the front grill of Donny Mercanto’s slick, new Ford.

Fred had been 19 when he went off to war. I’d heard my folks talk about it. Like most kids, he was pretty excited about it. He got sent to England and had nothing much to do but train over and over again for some coming exercise of war. In ’44, he was with the troops that stormed Normandy’s beaches.

“It was the beginning of the end of the war, my old man always said.”

Fred Thompson could have been a handsome man. He had a trim and lengthy body and an unusually well sculpted face.

I went back to the kitchen where my old lady was trying as best she could to keep the popular egg sandwiches coming. There was one on the counter, ready to go out to the luncheonette for the next customer who ordered it.

“Can I take this?”

“You already ate,” she said. “You want another one?”

“Yup. I’m hungry.”

“Guess you growing plenty. Go ahead.”

I lifted the top slices of bread and dumped some ketchup on the egg. I piled some chips on the plate next to the sandwich and poured out a hot cup of black coffee. The old lady looked at me strangely. I never drank coffee. She shook her head, kind of like she was surrendering. I knew my family thought I was the strangest of the litter and they kind of gave me room for that.

I took the plate of food and the cup of coffee to the very front of the store and struggled with the door that went out to the porch. I walked up behind Fred and looked down at him.

“Want some breakfast?”

Fred turned the entire upper part of his body around and looked back at me. His eyes were rock hard and never moved.

“Why?”

Well, that was a helluva question and, frankly, I didn’t have any ready answer. So, like one kid talking to another, I just threw something out there.

“Why not?”

“Don’t have enough money this morning.”

I sat down next to Fred, so he could turn his awkward looking body back around to face the green Ford again.

“It’s mine,” I said. “And I don’t want it after all. It shouldn’t go to waste, so eat it. Here.”

I handed the plate over to him and put the coffee down between us.

“You drink your coffee black, don’t you?”

Fred took the plate from me and looked at it stoically and seemed to wonder if I was fibbing to him.

“When’d you start drinking coffee?”

“I don’t,” I answered truthfully. “I poured that for you when I saw you out here on the porch. You don’t have to pay for it.”

Coffee was a nickel in those days and you could get a refill or two for that price, too. Some of the old guys sitting in the luncheonette with my old man were there for the morning. They had nothing better to do than talk and tell lies about what they did when they were young. My old man liked them all and he didn’t mind how long they stayed or how many cups of coffee they had. He’d hop up occasionally to take care of some customer who came into the store for a pack of cigarettes and a quart of homogenized milk.

“You’re a strange kid,” Fred said to me without turning his eyes from the grill of the car. He lifted the coffee cup to his lips and slurped a good sized swallow. He put the cup back down between us and tore off a bite of the fried egg sandwich. It was on toasted white bread that had been smothered with melted butter. “You’re a strange kid.”

“Yeh, I know. Everyone thinks so. I got two brothers, you know, who are sort of the saints of this shitty town, and I don’t look so hot when folks compare me to them.”

“You better watch your mouth, kiddo. Your mother hear that and she’ll stick a bar of soap in there and make you eat it.”

“Yeh. You know her pretty good, don’t you?”

“Best woman in town,” Fred said, with another bite of the egg sandwich in his mouth.

“What makes you say that?”

“She wrote to me. When I was sitting there in England, waiting for we didn’t know what, I got letters from her. Lord, it was good to get them and hear news of home. The boredom was awful and I was so homesick. Somehow she knew that. Just like she knows how much I like these egg sandwiches and black coffee. I know she sent this stuff out here for me.”

I didn’t correct him. He was happy in the thought.

“What were you waiting for?” I wanted to keep him talking. I wanted to understand his stinking mood.

“You know, my own mother didn’t write. Neither did anyone else in the family. But your old lady did. She’d always sign the letters from Milly. ‘With love, from Milly,’ she'd write. Made me feel good. She’d tell me all about what was going on in town – even about my own family. She’d tell me about your brother, Johnny, and what he was doing, and how you were always wearing a sailor suit all the time.”

Fred finished the sandwich and the chips up while he was doing that talking and he slurped at the hot coffee ‘til it was gone.

“You want some more coffee?”

“You think it’s all right?”

“Sure!” I’ll tell mom it’s for you.”

I grabbed the cup and shot up to my feet and went excitedly back to the store. I’d never heard Fred talk so much before. I wanted to get back to the porch before he closed himself down again.

“Can I take another coffee out to Fred?”

“Oh you! That’s who that sandwich and coffee was for, wasn’t it?”

“Yup! He said you wrote to him all the time during the war.”

She nodded and gave it some thought.

“It wasn’t all the time, but I wrote to him regularly. I wrote to all the soldiers and sailors from our town. Your father told me what it was like in the Great War, and how lonely the men got. I thought letters from people in town would help.” She went quiet, thinking again.

“He said you signed them with love from Milly.”

“That don’t mean nothing, you silly boy. You go up there to church all the time. You know what Christian love is. Saint Paul signed his letters with love, too. Don’t start over thinking things here. I wrote that at the end of my letters to all the boys.”

I poured out a full cup of the hot coffee for Fred and headed back toward the front porch. My old man saw me and signaled me over to him. He sat at a table with a couple of other old, town guys.

“I see you out there,” he said. “You be careful. I don’t know about Fred when he gets in one of these stinking moods.”

“I will,” I promised him, turning to get the hot coffee out to the porch.

I sat down next to Fred again and handed him the coffee. He took it without looking over at me.

“My mom said to say hi.”

“She did? Really?”

“Sure did,” I replied, wondering about his excitement.

“Best woman in the whole town,” he said again. “Your dad is damned lucky.”

“I guess.”

“No guesses about it,” he said with sudden firmness and a bit of anger. “You should appreciate her, the way she’s sick and all. You make sure, you hear?”

“You know she’s sick?” I was, for some reason, genuinely surprised.

“You stupid or something?” Fred reddened some and turned and looked me square in the eyes.

“No. I didn’t think people knew.”

“God, boy, you are missing a beat or two compared to your brothers. I guess folks is right. Any fool can see how much weight she’s lost. What? A hundred pounds or so? Feet all swelled up like that! Course we can tell she’s sick, you dumb duckling, you.”

I looked straight down at the gravel by my feet, genuinely embarrassed to be told how stupid I was and also sorry for my mother. I got really quiet for a while and just listened to Fred slurping his coffee. After some time passed and a number of people had passed behind us on the porch, entering the store and leaving it, I got up the nerve to ask something new, hoping it didn’t make me again sound stupid.

“What was it like over there?”

Fred pitched the last of the coffee into his mouth and swallowed, smacking his lips. He continued to look straight into the grill of the car just a couple of feet in front of him.

“You want another sandwich?”

“You ask too many questions,” Fred said sternly.

Questions were all I had. They were running around in my head at a high speed, swirling and wanting to get out.

“I’ll tell you,” Fred said, breaking the awkward moment for me, “it was damned boring at first.”

He shook his head and I could see that he was getting prepared to tell me a lot. I was boiling up inside, hoping no one would come out on to the porch and break the spell.

“We didn’t do nothing but those damned training exercises for two years. Lot of marching. Lot of shooting our guns at targets. Climbing steep hills and cliffs. Moving machine guns over rough and rugged ground. We ate lousy food and got tea instead of coffee. Generals were always coming and inspecting us. We’d ask when we were going to move? Get in the war, you know? They’d always tell us that we’d go when the time was right. Not before.”

Fred kicked some gravel with his foot. He sat silently for a few seconds, thinking.

“We landed in a place called Mercyside, in Liverpool. It was one of England’s biggest ports and soldiers from America came streaming into the country through it. We traveled about 30 miles north of the city, to a camp that had been built for us there. Boring as hell. We worked on building bunkers and pill boxes that would be like the ones we’d see when we invaded the continent. All the soldiers knew that we were preparing for it, that we were gonna do it. We’d practice attacking those things and taking them out. The strange thing was that guys never died next to you, you know. I mean, we were all safe and we always won. We’d take the bunkers out and wreck the pill boxes. We always won. No casualties. No buddies died.”

“For almost two years it was practice, practice and practice again. Amazing how cold it was there. Cold, cold rain. Mud. Never a good meal. We’d wear heavy clothing, but it’d get wet and stinking. I got moved eventually into a mortar detail. Carry those damned mortar shells all over our practice area. Heavy crap! Make your knees buckle trying to haul it up a hillside. March 10 miles a day at the fastest pace possible. Then we’d fire those mortars at targets placed out in the moors. Then we’d spend Saturdays cleaning up all our equipment – especially the guns and the mortar. On Saturday nights we’d get to go into the city to have a beer or two, if you want to call it that. It was more like warm piss. English don’t know about cold, chilled beer and they don’t understand about hot, black coffee. Boring is mostly what it was. Getting ready, that is. Waiting. Homesick as hell. Your mother’s nice letters helped. They brought me news of home. Oh, how I wanted to be home. Right here in Chester.”

Someone drove by out on Main Street and a horn sounded loudly. The two of us, sitting on the porch, tucked in right behind the ’56 Ford, weren’t very visible. It was probably some jerk friend of one of my brothers, just sounding the horn for the hell of it. When Fred knew I was listening again, he went on.

“It was about the middle of May in ’44 that they put us on trains and sent us down to Plymouth, in the south of England, right on the sea. Soldiers were packed in there like sardines in a can. Thousands and thousands of us and we all knew what it meant. Practice was over. No more rehearsals. We were going in for real. The food improved, though. They began to feed us real good. There was no more mail coming. That was all back in Mercyside. It was at the very end of May when a big group of us, the 116^th infantry regiment, 29^th Division, was gathered in a big tent and a Commander pointed to a model that had been built on a table in front of him. He had a long pointer in his hand and he tapped on a spot below a steep cliff and said that this was Omaha Beach.

“This is how we’ll defeat the Germans, boys,” the commander said to the gathered troops. “We’ll establish a bridgehead right here. It will enable the Allies to land in force. Proudly, boys, we will be in the first wave to land on the beaches.”

Both of us sat silently. I wanted to ask about the real war and the invasion, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. As if he understood, Fred spoke in a whisper.

“You don’t want to know about the invasion. You’re too young and too stupid. You’ll never get it. It was just after 6:30 in the morning when the ramps of the landing craft dropped down and we jumped into the water. I was in about waste high and I started wading for shore when the machine gun fire opened up on us, sweeping back and forth into the men trying to make it ashore. The water, I swear, turned red. Why send men on to a beach like that? Sitting ducks, you know. Guys right next to me getting ripped to pieces, shredded by a line of fire from machine guns. Mortar and cannon fire rained down us. Guys were crying for their mommas – screaming and crying like babies. Somehow I got to the cliff all right and huddled against it and wished I was back in the moors, in those cold, miserable, boring moors. Lost about everyone in my unit. I looked back at them there on the beach. Dead. Mangled bodies. Some were just dying. They were out there squirming and crying and it was impossible to go to them. Couldn’t help them. I’d dropped my mortar shells as I crossed the beach. Didn’t matter. None of the mortar firing equipment made it across the beach either. I had a rifle slung across my back and a few grenades hung on my belt. I hugged the steep cliff for hours and hours. Slowly the crying and moaning out on the beach came to an end. Finally, at some time, hours and hours after we landed, the order came to scale the cliffs, to climb to the top and face the bunkers and the pill boxes. Less than half my unit was left. A lot less than half. I knew we’d lose another half at the top of the cliffs and I figured I’d probably be one of them. But, we climbed.”

I was trembling and couldn’t stop myself. Fred went on and on, but I stopped listening. This isn’t the way the movies made the war look. Just the year before I’d seen Audie Murphy in his heroic film, To Hell and Back. It made war look colorful and bright and the death in it wasn’t very real. Now I was listening to a broken man who had been whole and healthy until that day when he stormed the beaches in Normandy.

My dad wondered why Fred got himself into these stinking moods. I wondered now how he could not.

Fred had finished the climb to the top, when my old man came out on to the porch. He could see that Fred was in a daze and that I shook. I think he wanted to kick Fred in the back. He was mighty angry. He’d been at war and he knew what it did to men. No reason to share it with kids, though. That’s how he thought.

“Cullen called,” he said loudly to me, hoping to break Fred out of his mood. “They’re on their way for you. Going to pick you and Bobby up here. I’ll call Bobby’s house. You get yourself ready to go.”

I rose and that seemed to satisfy my old man. He went back into the store. I looked down at Fred. He was silent, but his head shook back and forth and he was sobbing quietly. I bent and picked up the empty coffee cup and the plate. I touched the man lightly on the shoulder and went back inside to get away from the horror of it all.

When the truck pulled up out on Main Street and honked for me, I moved to the porch quickly. Fred was gone and so were his stories. Bobby was climbing into the back of the truck. I followed him and the vehicle pulled away and headed up Hillside Road toward the big farm that was four or five miles out of town. Bobby spoke.

“Did you see, Fred?”

Bobby had seen Fred walking away from the store and it had frightened him. Fred was shaking his head, crying and swearing, Bobby told me.

“He was sure in one of his stinking moods,” Bobby said, mimicking his father. “He must be one of the dumbest shits in the world.”

“Naw,” I said, “you’re the dumb shit.”

But he didn’t hear me because of the roaring of the truck and the lashing sound the wind made as it blew past us. I wondered where Fred would go and what he would do with his day. All day long we lifted hay bales. We threw them from the ground up on to the wagons. We stacked them neatly for the ride back to the barns. We unloaded the wagons into the hay lofts and stacked the bales up to the hot, hot ceiling. Then we returned to the fields and did it all over again and again. Fred was on my mind all day long and I did not talk to the other boys who spent the day cussing and telling lies about the girls they’d kissed.

Fred Thompson left our store and walked down to his little apartment in the long, rotting building on Warren Street. He closed himself in his dank, miserable room and locked the door. Some kids, playing out in the street, heard the deafening roar that the big gun made.

That evening, at the dinner table, my old man told me about it. He was angry at Fred and called him a coward. I was in a stinking mood for the rest of the summer. Only getting back to school in September did anything to help. They buried Fred in the little cemetery up by the Congregational Church, on Hillside Avenue, on the way up to Pleasant Hill Farm.

I wondered if anyone had saved my mother’s letters to Fred. I would like to read them, pretending to be in Mercyside, bored and lonely for home.

Hard Times -- A Short Story

A Short Story -- Fiction!
by Charlie Leck

This short story – completely fictional – has some limited but not graphic descriptions of sexual activity. If you are offended by such literature, you probably should not read this account.

These were hard times in Minnesota. Certainly they were the most difficult times that Marleen Svenson had ever faced. Of course, she was only twenty-two and the economy had been in a boom period for the first twenty of those years. Now, as she lay in bed, listening to the shower that was running just behind the thin wall to her left, she was feeling awfully sorry for herself. And, she was angry as hell.

Her eyes wandered around the extremely small, studio apartment. Like most of the others in this south Minneapolis neighborhood, surrounding the spectacular Art Institute, her apartment building had been constructed in the early 50s. The plumbing and electrical wiring was old and so were the heating and air-conditioning systems. She could see the cracks and peeling pieces of the ceiling paint. Every evening, coming home from work, she could also smell the stale and aged pungency of the place – aromas left by generations of tenants who didn’t care. Was she just another of them? It was frustrating to deal with the property manager even in good times. Now, in these hard times, it was impossible. How she loved the newly constructed apartments and condominiums closer to downtown. Wow! That would be the place to live.

The guy in her shower, cleaning off the wondrous evidence of their night in bed together, had, of course, lied to her even as most men consistently did. He’d fed her a line of bullshit at Fryderyk’s, the little restaurant in the Northeast section of the city, where she worked as a waitress. Of course, he was single and had lost the girl he’d dated for years. He told her he worked in the city’s finest law firm and was in line to be made a partner. In truth, he did wear spectacular clothing that even Marlene could tell had been hand-tailored for his very impressive, slender and strong body. His hair was expensively coiffed and it framed a perfectly handsome and manly face with a delicately squared jaw. His deep blue eyes had tantalized her all evening. She imagined that women were constantly fawning all over him, pandering to him.

Now, in a more rational moment, she realized he could have found nothing special in her except a momentary sexual urge that had riled up his insides. When he had first stepped into the shower, Marlene had taken the opportunity to fish out his thin billfold from the inside breast pocket of his suit coat that hung from the doorknob on her closet door. There she’d found, along with the platinum colored card from American Express and several hundred dollar bills, the photographs of his gorgeous wife and splendidly cute twin girls.

It had happened to her too many times before; and so she wasn’t going to blame anyone but herself. And besides, the sex had been damned good and he had slowly and softly strummed the most sensitive cords of her desire and driven her through a prolonged moment of sheer ecstasy. Marleen, looking up at the wretched ceiling, envied his wife all the moments she had with him in bed.

And frankly, Marlene had brought him back here, to this shabby apartment, only because she’d realized he had plenty of money and might be able to help her out during these hard times. The more she panicked about her struggles, the more she did such stupid things.

She knew he would soon come out of her bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, showing off the firmness of his body. He’d say sweet things to her about how wonderful she’d been and that they should see each other again soon. It was always the same. It never changed. And, even though he’d been far better in bed than any of the others, she hated him and couldn’t wait for him to clear out of her apartment. She didn’t like men who lied – men who lied and cheated on their wives and put their marriages in danger.

The shower stopped and Marlene could hear the metal door spring open and vibrate softly. She could picture him stepping out of her shower and using one of her towels to wipe himself dry.

Her dreams were simple enough. Why were they so expensive to achieve? She just wanted to teach kids how to draw and paint and make beautiful things as a way of expressing something that each of us has inside. Before the hard times hit, she’d finished a year at M-CAD, as all the students called it – the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. It was expensive, but the tips ran hot at Fryderyk’s when she first started there. If she’d hustle hard, she could make and save just enough in a year to pay off most of the tutition and then put the rest on a student loan tab. When the bubble burst, Freyderyk’s was one of the restaurants that got hit hard. Business fell off by fifty percent and tips fell even more.

She talked to the financial office at M-CAD, but there wasn’t any scholarship money avialable for her. She felt all her dreams falling apart. She wasn’t going to get that dream degree after all. It would have been a ticket to a job in almost any middle school or high school in Minnesota. It might even get her summer jobs with advertising agencies or graphic design shops. Perhaps she'd be able to set up her own little instruction studio and teach there nights and summers.

So, she looked at a few of the community colleges instead. They were so blatantly inferior that it frightened her. Then she ran the numbers and realized that she couldn’t even afford them anyway. That’s how far things had fallen and how hard times were.

The door to the bathroom opened and startled Marlene out of her thoughts. Indeed, the handsome bastard came out of the steamy room with a towel wrapped around his waiste and folded cleverly and securly just above his hip. He smiled at her and walked to the bed where she lay.

She held up a hand to him, signaling him to stop. He looked surprised. She didn’t want to hear a lot of bullshit. She knew the truth now and the lies would only make her sick to her stomach. She could still feel him inside her and the insides of her thighs still bore a thick stickiness from what he had left there.

“Just dress and go, please,” she said rapidly and sternly to him. “I made a mistake bringing you here. I shouldn’t have done it and I’m sorry. It wasn’t good and it wasn’t right. Please, just dress quickly and leave. Forget this ever happened.”

She could see his ego crash. It spun wildly as she spoke to him and then it tumbled fiercely and dropped straight down. He stammered and tried to say something, but she cut him off again and asked him to leave.

“Please! Go! Quickly!”

She allowed the blankets to remain down at her waist as she leaned back on several fluffed pillows. He could see her strong, generous breasts and she could tell he liked them. It made her even angrier, but she refused to lift the blankets.

He was nearly frozen there in shock. She could see the disbelief if his face.

She wants me to leave -- to go -- to get out quickly. What does she think?

“What do you mean, it was a mistake to bring me here?”

“Please! Don’t do this! I asked you to go! Go quickly! Please!”

He began to turn away, but he stopped and turned back to her, not understanding.

“What is it? What made you so angry at me?”

“Go! Go! Get out of my apartment!”

Awkwardly, he moved toward the dresser upon which his underwear was thrown. She watched him as he dropped the towel and tried to pull on his briefs much too quickly. He lost his balance and stumbled and struggled to land safely on both his feet, with the white briefs tangled at his ankles.

Marlene wanted to laugh, but she didn’t. He was so generously equipped and delightful to look at this way. How she had enjoyed fondling and kissing and tantalizing him to the point of craziness.

A second quick try drew the tight white briefs over the most delectible part of his body and he rapidly followed with socks, shirt, pants, shoes, tie and jacket. He looked into the mirror and brushed and fluffed his hair around. Behind him, in the reflection, he could see her lying there with her breasts uncovered and she could see him looking at her. Without turning around he spoke to her.

“I want to see you again!”

“No,” she replied softly, with no hint of displeasure in her voice. “I don’t want to see you again. It wasn’t right. We’re not right.”

“Not right? Are you crazy? We were glorious together!”

“Just get out!” She screamed at him, the pitch of her voice frightening her.

He wanted to call her a “bitch,” but he was fearful now of the anger he saw in her eyes. Perhaps she really was crazy. In the mirror, he took one long, last and longing look at her magnfiicent breasts; and he took the two quick steps to the door that let him out into the dim hallway. He pulled the door shut firmly behind him. He was gone.

Marlene rolled completely over and flung her face into her pillow and allowed her body to drift down into the matress with the heaviness of solid concrete. Everything was dark and black and the heat of her breath bathed her face. She mumbled into her pillow.

“Why am I such a fool?”

u

Minneapolis is a good city for an artist who doesn’t want too much city. For a community of only a half-million people, there are a number of wonderful art museums and some terribly good galleries. Marlene liked MIA the most -- the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. There was a large wing of the building that housed M-CAD. She was very much at home here and very comfortable.

It was slow on weekday mornings and she liked to get there at opening time and stay a few hours before she had to take the bus to northeast and Freyderyk’s.

She still had her copiest badge and she wore it whenever she visited the museum with her sketch pad in hand. The school had not asked that it be returned when she withdrew. The badge allowed her to sit before the paintings and to sketch them or reproduce them in the medium used by the original artists.

She particularly liked a painting in the collection called Portraite of Madammoiselle Hortense Valpinçon by Edgar Degas. She’d been working for days on a sketch of it. It was nearly four feet wide and she was reducing its width to approximately 17 inches and she wasn’t worried about colors. She was trying to capture the mysterious and wonderful look in the young girl's face. Perhaps she was 11 or 12. She seemed to understand mysteries that went way beyond her years. She understood life and her place in it. She carried a peaceful acceptance of herself and her surroundings. Degas had finished the oil painting in 1871 while visiting the home of a friend in Normandy; yet there was something modern and contemporary about it. Colors exploded from unexpected places.

The painting hung in a peaceful and usually quiet place in the museum where Marlene could work on her sketch slowly and patiently; but, on this particular morning, Marlene’s surroundings and peacefulness were interrupted by someone important who was receiving a tour of the museum from the Chief Curator himself. The little man, with the pleasing Dutch accent was pointing to the Degas and explaining it to a handsome young man in a well cut business suit. Marlene tried to ignore them and gave full attention to her sketch, touching it lightly here and there with her soft pencil, but she felt eyes staring down at her. She raised her head to look. Her faced flushed when she saw him. It was the creep she’d thrown out of her place a few months before -- the man with the gorgeous wife and the twin girls.

He tore his eyes from her and gave his attention again to the curator. Their conversation wandered and Marlene could not help overhearing them. Obviously, her one night lover had been elected to the Board of Directors. He was receiving an insider’s tour of the museum and the important pieces in its collection. He was likely ignorant about art and the ways of art and artists; but, he likely had scads of money to give away to both impress the community with his philanthropy and to gather some income tax deductions.

As her face burned, Marlene could feel his tender hands on her thighs and his tongue sliding over her abdomen. Her face flushed even hotter. She hated the bastard for having made such magnficent love to her. She hated him.

Yet, she raised her eyes afer him when she heard the footsteps of the two men moving further off into the gallery. His handsome, tight body made him look comedically out of place next to the soft, pillow shaped form of the curator.

She looked away from him and back toward the Degas, and into the eyes of the young Valpinçon girl. What a sparkling beauty. What a magnificent painting! Had he noticed? Did he appreciate it? Did he realize what talent it took to create it?

Her morning was in ruin, but she remained in her place there on the floor, leaning on the wall across from the one on which the painting hung. Sweet Hortense was in a comfortable and wealthy home. Monsuier Valpinçon would have no difficulty sending her off to study in any of the great academies of France. Yet, Marlene did not envy Hortense or begrudge her anything. The young girl had become a friend over the weeks that Marlene had sat here visiting with her.

The light changed in the hallway and Marlene knew it was time to pack her pencils and sketch pad and head over to the bus stop on Nicollet Avneue. She needed to be at Freyderyk’s in short order. She rose and flicked her legs to loosen the joints that had been so still on the hard floor for two hours. She took one last look into the eyes of Hortense and saw him, instead, looking over at her. She spun to walk away.

“Wait! I need to talk to you.”

She kept walking quickly, her shoes clicking and echoing loudly on the hard floor; but his long and powerful legs brought him up beside her in only several steps.

“I’ve been terribly angry at you,” he said as he hurried along beside her. It was like someone had begun playing a flute that was badly out of tune. There was something terribly incongruous about what he’d said.

“You’ve been angry at me? Oh, brother! You must be crazy! Please go away and leave me alone.”

“Wait! You’ve got to hear me out!”

She reached the staircase that led downward and turned toward the museum lobby.

“I’m late for work. I need to hurry. I’ve no time to listen to any more of your lies.”

He stopped and she walked on ahead as rapidly as she could. She was embarrassed when she heard him loudly call out after her.

“You’re wrong you know! I’m not married. I never have been. I have no children! You saw the photograph in my billfold. That’s my sister and my two nieces. You were wrong, you know!”

Many people were watching them, including a security guard who looked nervous and ready to spring. Marleen continued out through the lobby of the museum and through the doors that led out on to Third Avenue. She walked quickly to the sidewalk and turned north, toward 25th Street. Then, she stopped and looked back. He had come out through the big, glass doors as well. He had stopped just outside and was watching her. Now they were both frozen, looking at each other. He called over to her.

“You were wrong!” He paused significantly and then called out to her again. “And, I’m angry at you!”

She could taste his lips and feel his warm breath. Yet, she remembered so clearly how he had reacted when she accused him. He had not protested. He had just been dumbfounded. (But, wait! Had she accused him? She couldn't remember. Perhaps she hadn't!)

He turned and went back into the museum, through the big doors, and disappeared in the darkness of the lobby. He was gone.

Marlene was confused and hesitated too long; and then she ran quickly back toward the big white building, and the glass doors, through which he had completely disappeared.

A Short Story

Big Cole Anderson
by Charlie Leck

The following is a draft of a short story I wrote over the last several days. I offer it to those of you who wish to read it and make comments and suggestions for me. It is somewhat lengthy (about 14 pages in a standard book size), so you may prefer not to tackle it. I will not be offended if you choose not to read it. Come back in a couple of days for my next blog.

Cole Anderson was an extraordinarily big man and he knew it. He was the biggest man the folks of Dublin had ever seen. Cole liked being big and he enjoyed towering over other people. In so many ways he was deeply insecure. He doubted himself and lacked real confidence. He wasn’t very well educated. He was pretty much withdrawn and shy. Yet, when he was up close to other people, always looking down at them, feeling as if he could encompass them and smother them in his grasp, he thought he gained something of an advantage over them. As a matter of fact, nearly everyone was afraid of Cole because of both his size and his general ignorance and slow mindedness. It was this fear that people had for him that kept Cole going in his work.

This big man -- big like a giant -- worked for the town of Dublin, in Iowa. He was the town’s only paid employee and he did just about everything. He took care of the city’s records and filings and money, though there wasn’t much of any of those things in such a small town. There were less than 500 people living in Dublin and it wasn’t on a highway that went anywhere much at all. Cole also cared for the roads and the one little city park that contained a set of swings and one rusty, old slide for very small children. There weren’t really any utilities to watch over. Everyone had his own well and septic system and they all got their electricity from the county’s rural cooperative. For fire protection services, the community just depended on the town of Rybak, 11 miles or so on down a narrow and winding county road.

Cole was also the town policeman. There wasn’t a police car or anything like that. Cole just drove his own car -- an 81’ Jeep Cherokee with a stick shift. On the few occasions when Cole needed to stop someone he just plugged a blinking red light into his cigarette lighter opening and set it up on the dashboard. Instead of a siren, he’d just blow his horn with some authority. The town was supposed to pay Cole a mileage allowance for using his own car, but there was never enough money in the treasury to make such payments, so Cole just ignored filing any reimbursement forms.

To get more specific about Cole Anderson, he was just over six feet, nine inches tall. He weighed nearly 300 pounds and he had feet and hands that were bigger than any the folks in Dublin had ever seen before. When Cole shook hands with anyone, he just enveloped that person’s entire hand in his own so there was nothing left to see -- not a finger or the tip of a finger or anything below the wrist.

Cole also had a massive head that was, even as big as his body was, way out of proportion with the rest of his anatomy. Folks had all they could do not to laugh at Cole when they saw him coming. His big, ambling body was funny enough, but then they’d see that head that was too big for his body and they would really get a jolt of the giggles. Except, of course, nobody would laugh because they were frightened that Cole might reach out and slap them with one of those massive paws of his

However, it wasn’t really Cole’s size that made nearly everyone afraid of him. It was his apparent dimwittedness that set his townsfolk to shivering in his presence. Why Cole could say some of the strangest and most unexpected things in reply to a simple statement about how it was such a nice day, that folks would wonder if this big ape was so dumb that he might inadvertently attack and crush a normal person just out of sheer lunacy and stupidity.

Ryan Polzak told some of the townsfolk that he was stopped by Cole and his flashing red light one day when he was driving along Sapp Street. So he asked Cole what he had done wrong and Cole just looked at Ryan in disbelief that he would ask such a question when it was perfectly obvious why Cole had stopped Ryan.

Now, Ryan said, he felt some sort of tremble come across Cole and he didn’t want to push things by asking any more questions, so he just sat back there in his car and waited for Cole to tell him he could go on now.

Cole finally spoke up, shaking his finger in Ryan’s face and showering him in a significant amount of spit as he spoke.

“Now you better get this mess of a car washed up, so it’s clean on Sunday when you go over to Westby to church, or I’m going to slap you in jail.”

“Why, Cole, we ain’t got no jail,” Ryan said before thinking better of it than to correct Cole to his face. Cole again shook a finger in Ryan’s face and answered him rather coldly.

“The operational word here, Mr Ryan Polzak,” Cole said with a long, drawn out emphasis on the pole part of Ryan’s last name, “is slap.”

Ryan thought about that for a few seconds: “The operational word here is slap!” Then Ryan got pretty scared when he looked up into Cole’s big face with those over-sized, protruding ears and that massive nose with a jungle of hair growing out of it, and he, thinking about how Cole could probably knock his head clear off if he slapped him upside the head, thought he might piss in his pants until Cole finally slapped the roof of his car and told him to get on his way now and get the car washed “afore Sunday anyhow!”

Now in that circle of townsfolk where Ryan told that story about Cole, you might have expected a decent amount of laughter or howling or, at least, a fair amount of giggling, but those folks who listened to the story fell open-mouthed and silent as church mice. There had been genuine fear in Ryan’s face as he told the story and that sign of anxiousness was transferred to all those who listened to him.

The entire idea of getting slapped up the side of the head by Cole Anderson was about as frightening as anything any one of them could picture.

Yet, with all of this established as fact, there is one thing you ought to understand clearly. There was one of the townsfolk in Dublin who indeed had no fear of Cole Anderson and who rather liked the man and found him kind and helpful; and that was Rebecca Stonehold.

Rebecca was the mother of little, 4 year old Robert Stonehold whose father had died in one of America’s silly and undeclared wars and left Robby without a father and Rebecca alone to raise Robby up.

Cole had stopped by the town park one day when Robby and his mother were there and the little boy recognized just right away who Cole was and what his most important job was, too. He went running up to the big man while Rebecca held back in a corner of the park.

“This here slide ain’t no good,” the little boy shouted up to the big man.

Rebecca took a picture in her mind of the boy who came up to about the knee cap of the giant fellow and talked up to him as if he might whoop him if Cole didn’t do something right away about his complaint.

Rebecca thought it was “a picture of total incongruity, if that’s the right word,” the woman told her grandmother on the telephone that night.

“My, there was Robby with his short, blonde hair and those bright blue eyes, with that little pug nose of his, and his tiny ears, talking to this giant of a man, who might have come right out of the Jack and the Giant Beanstalk story, and I just had to lean back and laugh out loud.”

“Well, what did the big hulk do?” Rebecca’s Grandma Laura asked from her easy chair in Nora Springs, Iowa.

“Why, grandma, he said to little Robby that he would certainly take a look at the slide and then, if he could, go get the tools he needed to fix it.”

Robby and the big giant of a man walked together across the playground to where the little slide stood.

“See here?”

Robby called up to Cole and showed the big man how the slide wouldn’t stay put and nearly tipped over everytime a child climbed up on it to enjoy the ride down.

“Well, that won’t do at all,” Cole smiled widely and said to the boy who was way down below him. “I think what I better do is go back to the city garage and get a bag of cement and then I’ll come back here and we’ll try to fix those front legs and back legs of this slide so they won’t move around no more.”

Robby shook his head in affirmation, indicating that the idea sounded workable to him.

“But, I’m gonna need some real help to do the job, now little man. Could you hang around here while I get what we need in the way of tools and stuff, so you can help me when I get back?”

Robby looked over at his mother for leadership on that difficult question and Rebecca nodded to him with a smile on her face.

“I sure can,” Robby said, turning back to Cole. “I’ll be right here when you return.”

So on that summer afternoon, the little slide got planted in a big wad of cement and every little kid recognized the improvement and always gave Robby credit for getting that big, crazy guy to get the job done; however, the boy always took such remarks without humor and expressed his dissatisfaction that anyone would talk that way about his and his mom’s good friend, Cole.

The local police car, an orange-brown Jeep Cherokee, was often seen parked at Rebecca Stonehold’s home during the supper hour after that day when the slide was repaired in the town park. There was plenty of scandalous talk about that fact around town, but most of it lost steam because the car was gone from the Stonehold home shortly after the dinner hour and was always seen either patrolling around town or back over at Cole’s own miserable, unkempt house.

Cole Anderson’s home is another whole part of this intriguing story about Dublin’s town employee. Though Cole was often seen at the Stonehold house, making repairs of every sort, whether to the roof or a tattered screen or a porch step, no work, it seems, had been done on Cole’s home in many, many years.

“Not since his old pa died, anyhow,” is how the word went around town when it came to talking about how run-down and shameful was Cole’s own house.

After his pa died, all repairs ceased on what was then viewed as Cole’s house. It didn’t matter what it was. If a window broke, Cole either boarded it up, if it faced north or northeast, or stretched some plastic across the opening if it faced south or southwest. Roof repairs weren’t made and, instead, buckets were used, and often emptied several times in big rainstorms, to handle any leaks. When the back stairs fell apart and were no longer usable, the front door became the only point of access and egress in the home. The old garage in the back of the house simply wobbled one day and came crashing down. Fortunately, the Jeep Cherokee was not parked inside it at the time and Cole decided that the automobile, from that day on, could do just as well parked outside as in.

Within only a few weeks of the day Cole’s mother died, just about all of the old house except the kitchen, Cole’s bedroom and an old bathroom off the kitchen were closed up and never used again. No single person ever got to see the inside of Cole’s home and it was left to the imagination of each and every soul who lived in Dublin to picture what it may have been like in there. Those, of course, were not pretty pictures at all.

It was only a month or so after Cole’s mother’s death that the repairs were made to the slide in the community park. After that, Cole was often seen at the town’s grocery store, if one could call it that, purchasing groceries that seemed bound for the Whitehold residence; that is, those purchases often included some items that it was known well enough were favorites of little Robby Whitehold -- especially those little, chewable wax bottles that were filled with colored sugar-water.

While Rebecca cooked up a relatively handsome dinner of stews, or hashes, noodles, dumplings, meatloaf, maccaroni caserole or something of the sort, Robby and Cole would play outside in the fine weather, throwing a ball back and forth to each other or flying a kite out there on Leffler Road. It was quite a sight watching Cole trying to get a kite to rise up on a gust of wind. The man was so unnaturally clumsy that it took him the longest time to learn how to release the kite on the breeze; but, because it was vital to Robby, Cole recognized the importance of learning these skills and he worked at them until they were accomplished. Throwing a ball had been something he had tried to do from childhood and always gave up the effort because it had been concluded by himself and others that it was a skill he would never master; however, for Robby, after several weeks of diligent practice with the town baseball coach over at Grassly Township, Cole learned how to make the throw and catch with a decent amount of both grace and skill.

After several months of such mutal attention, Robby and Cole became very deep and close friends. Robby, to Cole, became the most important thing or person in the whole world. Though Cole did not understand the concept, he loved little Robby with his whole heart and his entire being. And for that, in return, Rebecca Whitehold loved Cole very much.

When the three of them, Rebecca, Robby and Cole, on Saturday, August 11th of last year, showed up at the ice cream social at the First Methodist Church of Dublin, Iowa, well, I can’t explain properly enough, what a storm of interest and gossip the coming out caused. The three of them climbed out of Cole’s Jeep Cherokee together and, as they came across the parking lot, Robby took up a position between them and held his mother’s hand while Cole’s hand enveloped nearly all of Robby’s other hand and lower arm.

Now it should be told that Rebecca Stonehold is a mighty pretty woman. Just before she went off to Iowa State, she lived with her grandmother just east of Mason City, in the little town of Nora Springs. Her parents had died in an automobible accident when they were returning home from a weekend trip to Minneapolis. Rebecca was but 14 yeas old when the accident happened. Rebecca’s daddy ran a pharmacy right there on West Congress Street and was the most popular man in town. He umpired at little league games and was head of the Rotarians and a deacon in the United Methodist Chruch on North Hawkeye Street. It was a sad, sad day in Nora Springs when the town learned they lost one of their best.

Rebecca’s grandpa, Lamont Ferguson, who adored his only child, his beloved daughter, Rachael May, died within a year of that auto accident of a broken heart, they say. Fortunately, her parents had left behind some life insurance funds that were able to sustain both Rebecca and her grandmother, and then send the girl off to college. From what’s told around these parts, Grandma Laura Ferguson was heroic the way she kept life and a semblance of happiness going for a teenage Rebecca.

She and Rob met at Iowa State and dated their entire four years of school. Just after their graduation, those two beautiful young people got married right up there in Nora Springs, with Grandma Laura giving the bride away. When they moved down here so that Rob could begin his coaching and teaching career, the two of them were considered about the handsomest couple that had ever exsisted in the community of Dublin, or within the entire county for that matter. Rob’s dad had farmed nearly half of Lobley County, just 7 or 8 miles outside of Dublin, and Rob was a big basketball star during his years at Grassly Regional High School. He was so good that he earned himself a full-ride basketball scholarship to Iowa State University. He came home from the University, with Rebecca, to take the basketball coaching job at Grassly and to teach civics and American history at the school as well. He also joined the National Guard in order to earn a little extra money and to avoid having to farm with his dad during the summer. None of us thought much about it when Rob and the rest of his unit were called up and sent into the desert, in some nation half way around the world, to fight for some ill-explained cause or other. It wasn’t even three months after Rob left town, for parts of the world we didn’t understand or couldn’t place on a map, that a uniformed soldier showed up on Lefler Road looking for the home of Rob Stonehold. Upon finding the correct house, and after introducing himself, he presented Rebecca with a letter from Rob’s commanding officer who explained how brave her husband had been and how he had sacrificed his life so that we, in Dublin, might be free. He also presented her with a folded flag and explained that Rob’s body would be coming home sometime soon, but there were complications in transportation arrangements and it might be sometime before the coffin actually arrived in Iowa.

The first thing Rebecca did was to call Pastor Hardin and, sobbing, begged him to come over to her house to comfort Robby.

It was a long time after that before we saw even the slightest hint of a smile out of Rebecca Stonehold, but we could tell she was a strong woman who was going to be there for Robby no matter how stupid the world and its wars. The whole town admired her. She kept teaching English at the high school and she kept little Robby close to her and made sure he felt as loved as a child could be. She knew what it was to lose parents as a child; and Grandma Laura had taught her a thing or two.

There were plenty of young guys who wanted to date Rebecca, but she wouldn’t have any of them. Rob had been special. He was probably as extraordinary as any young man who ever lived in this town and no grave over there in the cemetary was visited any more than was his. It would take someone very special to replace Rob Stonehold in the heart of his sweet Rebecca and, for that matter, in the heart of the town of Dublin.

So that day, when the three of them came walking across the gravel parking lot at the Methodist Church, and they were all smiling widely and laughing outloud, well, we were all just stunned that the big lug who worked for our little town could give this beautiful woman such a gift.

I mean, here’s the facts as best I can respectfully say them. Rebecca Stonehold is probably the prettiest dang woman who ever lived in the town of Dublin. My goodness, she is one of the most knock-you-down and make-you-look, pulchritudinous women we’ve ever seen in these parts. And here she was, gayly strolling across the parking lot in the company of a man who had to be the most aberrant and strangest looking fellow ever to come out of the entire state of Iowa, no less our own little community. Cole Anderson was really no ordinary human being. Here in our community we regarded him as something of a freak who we both feared for what he might surprisingly do someday and as something far less than an actual human being.

Yet, I’ll ltell you something that is as true as anything you’ll ever hear coming out of the state of Iowa. Never were there three people any more happy than that strange threesome who skipped their way into our hearts at the ice cream social in Dublin last year.

The three of them were the hit of the social. All of us watched little Robby cling to big Cole Anderson. And, we took notice of how affectionately the man held the child on his lap. We blushed a bit when Rebecca Stonehold reached across to Cole and put her hand upon his arm and laughed with him about some terribly humorous thing that Robby had said about all the doings-on.

I’m here to tell you that it brought some tears to the eyes of grown, serious and pessimistic men. What it did to the ladies and old women of the crowd is too extraordinary to describe here. There was a general buzz of happiness that is powerful enough to transform a whole community. And who among us would have thought that such a phenomenon could have been brought to us on the crooked and awkward shoulders of our town cop and works superintendent?

Now, none of this is to say that any of us thought there was an element of romance in this whole relationship between Cole Anderson and Rebecca Stonehold. No sir! Yet, we were mighty surprised one day when several trucks and a big piece of machinery were hauled into town from Davenport and they all pulled into Cole’s big yard and commenced tearing everything asunder and loading up the shards and shreds of the Anderson house and garage. In three days time there wasn’t a drop of evidence that there had ever been a shack of a house there on that property.

And it wasn’t one week later that the Larkin Homes Company, of Bettendorf, started digging out a foundation and laying the footings for a brand new house on the old and former Norman Stanley Anderson property. And a right fine and pretty house it was. My goodness, it contained the most opulent kitchen anyone in this community had ever seen. There was a splendid playroom that was designed with young Robby Stonehold in mind, as was his bedroom on the second floor at the very head of a grand and curving staircase that led up there from a grand foyer (which was in all honesty a word that none of us around here really had heard before nor did we know how to pronouce it in the proper French manner). And, on either side of Robby’s attractive bedroom were two other bedrooms of equal size and extraordinary comfort. Each of the three bedrooms had its very own bathroom.

It seemed like the big house rose up in no time at all over the summer months and, before the beginning of the school season, a landscaping company had come in here from Des Moines and laid out a lawn of several acres surrounding the house and its three-car garage and laid down a sports court that was virtually unheard of outside of city circles in our state.

It was on August 11 of that summer that we all first noticed the “For Sale” sign that went up in the yard of the house on Lefler Road where young Robby Stonehold and his mother, Rebecca, lived.

Cole Anderson, from some source of money that none of us knew the first thing about, had built a lovely house for Robby and Rebecca out there on his parents’ old farm property. All the detritus of Cole’s old life had been neatly and completely swept away and in its place had risen, like a Phoenix, the most beautiful home in all of Dublin or in all of the county for that matter.

Well, we were naturally very curious about this relationship between Cole and Rebecca and all sorts of rumors circulated around town that were always the main topics of conversation at Dooley’s Tavern and at the Perk-Up Coffee Shop over morning breakfast.

Hamm Sullivan had done all the plumbing work at the new house and it was he who described its luxuriousness to to all of us. It appeared to him, Hamm said, that Rebecca and Cole were to have separate bedrooms on either side of Robby’s very extraordinary room. It didn’t look like any love arrangement, Hamm said, and it looked as if, to him, that Cole had invited Robby and his mother to come live in his new house.

It was on exactly 9 September that the barn builders showed up on the Anderson farm and began the construction of a handsome, but small, red barn. It was completely finished by the end of the month and, before the final splash of paint was applied, rumors drifted over from Ames that Harley Woods, the most famous quarter horse trainer in Iowa, was bringing over the cutest pony that he had ever seen or trained.

The shocker was yet to come. It was there in the county newspaper on 14 October. There was to be an open house for the entire Community at Cole Anderson’s new house on the 22nd of the month. Everyone was invited, but they were encouraged to car pool so too many cars would not be parked out on the county road. The story in the paper said that Digger Newton was going to be there with his pig roaster and Mrs. Newton was planning all the side dishes, desserts and beverages. Why the whole town buzzed with the exciting news for days, but it was only the beginning of the portentous news to come.

Postmaster Enid Coleman, only a day after the story broke in the county newspaper about the open house, said a rumor had drifted down from Nora Springs that Rebecca had introduced Cole to her Grandma Laura and that they had talked of setting a wedding date. The rumor ran rampant on the wings of the breeze and it had touched the ears of every man, woman and child in Dublin by the daylight’s end.

Pastor Hardin, at the Methodist Church, was mighty flustered about the tale and how it was growing like a monster with every retelling of it. This, he thought, needed to be nipped in the bud or whatever part of it was truth had to be substantiated and controlled. He headed out toward Cole Anderson’s new house.

Mrs. Hardin waited patiently for her husband’s return. It was considerably past her and her husband’s bed times when she finally saw the headlights of his car turning into the driveway of the parsonage. She rushed to meet her husband at the doorway from the garage and, as she always did, to take his hat and coat. She noticed immediately, even in the dim light, that the pastor was ghostly white.

“What is it dear? What is it?”

The pastor shook his head silently. His eyes glowed with wonder and excitement, but he was nearly breathless and couldn’t speak.

“Come, dear,” his wife said. “Come and sit down.”

So, from his chair in the parlor, as soon as he could speak, the pastor told his loving wife all the news about the new and spectacular house and about Robby and Rebecca and Cole. Mrs. Hardin was left speechless by the news.

Indeed, Cole had proposed to Rebecca Stonehold and the woman had agreed and allowed Cole to place on her finger a diamond ring that had been Cole’s mother’s. Rebecca had held out her hand with great excitement and joy for the pastor to examine the quaint piece of jewelry. As she did, Robby squealed with happiness and Cole beamed proudly from the large, over-sized chair that had been placed in the new home just for him.

The pastor had always thought of Cole, quite honestly, as a genuinely grotesque and awkward looking fellow, but as Cole looked over at him now, with that broad smile and sparkling eyes, the pastor realized there was something else about the man that he had always missed -- that had escaped the entire community.

Cole Anderson was a good and kind man. He had never been given the chance to love anyone -- not even his own, strange parents -- until he met little Robby. The boy had taught the giant of a man how to love and what it felt like to be loved in return. And the mother, pretty Rebecca, had been caught up in the love and drawn into its triangle. She was consumed by a love, which only a mother can understand, for her son, but she found herself unable to escape the magnetic draw toward Cole Anderson.

On the morning of the ice cream social, she explained to Pastor Hardin, as they were leaving her home and walking toward Cole’s Jeep Cherokee, she had reached up on her tippy-toes, as high as she could get, and had kissed Cole on the cheek. She told him that he was the kindest and sweetest man she had ever met. And, in that instant, she whispered to the pastor, Cole Anderson became handsome and desirable. His clumsiness seemed to float away, Rebecca said to the pastor, and a charming confidence settled over him. And his tongue relaxed and he was able to speak softly and smoothly.

“And you, Rebecca, are more beautiful than the most extraordinary of all God’s angels. You and dear Robby have taught me about happiness and love. I would never have known either had it not been for you. You so kindly shared your son and allowed me to have the first friend in my entire life. It was a gift that only an angel can give.”

Pastor Hardin’s wife sat quietly, listening to her husband’s account, and tears streamed from her eyes and slid down her cheeks. It was the grandest love story she had ever heard.