Poodie James
Doug Ramsey
* * *
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * *
PUBLISHED BY: Doug Ramsey on Smashwords
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
. . . ever on orchard boughs they keep Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep On moon-washed apples of wonder.
—“Moonlit Apples,” John Drinkwater, 1917
In memory of Charles Hayes, James Moran and Sophus K. Winther
1.
HARRY TRUMAN RECEDED, smiling and waving from the observation platform. To Poodie James, the three o’clock August sun glinting off the President’s glasses looked like light flashing out of his eyes. The train dissolved north along the Columbia past the packing sheds, through the orchards thick with ripening apples, into the foothills baking brown in the August afternoon. During a pause in the campaign speech, Cub Bailey had yelled, “Give ’em hell, Harry,” discomfiting some in the crowd, amusing most. When the train was gone, people stood on the platform and around the depot, talking in the heat, then moved to their cars or walked up into town. Poodie lurched along in front of his wagon, grinning under the tatters of his straw hat, aiming guttural sounds of greeting at everyone who passed.
“Look at that little bastard,” the mayor said to his police chief, “an embarassment to the town.”
Poodie was thinking that when he got to the pool he would float a while before he started the swimming lesson. The children loved to watch him float on his back, take a mouthful of water and squirt it straight up. They always laughed. Whales squirt up like that, he thought, but the water spouts out of the tops of their heads. He liked to think about whales, liked to read about them. They’re so big, he thought, and they can move so fast, so easily, through the water. Poodie was thinking about swimming across the Columbia, how he had to keep moving at an angle against the current and pull hard or he would end up too far downstream. Every time he went across and was too tired to swim back, he had to walk barefoot through the rocks and the sagebrush and look out for rattlers. Once he got a ride, but mostly he made his way to the bridge and walked across, and then it was a long way up along the warehouses back to his cabin. Mr. Winter told him he shouldn’t swim in the river because it couldn’t be trusted, he could drown.
#
Sam Winter leaned back in his office chair and looked up the avenue at the crowd. Parade like that, you’d think it was Apple Blossom morning. Lined up along the railroad tracks like a bunch of damn stooges listening to that blockhead trying to get reelected. Smart move, though, coming through on the train. Probably did him some good. Tom Dewey’s going to have to watch himself. Winter saw Poodie James round the corner onto the avenue.
Look at that, Poodie lunging ahead, grinning all the time, talking with people. At any rate, he thinks he’s talking. Sam smiled. Bunch of grunts and growls and I don’t know what all coming out of that little man. Saw him the other day down in front of the hobby shop. Always four or five boys around him, Poodie grinning and making strangling noises and those kids hanging on his every word, or moan or whatever it is. He’s interesting to have around town. I just wish Pete Torgerson wouldn’t get so upset about him. Damn Torgerson and his rigid ideas about what’s right for folks. It’s curious, Winter thought, all that slow, patient work he does with the Boy Scouts and the kids at the YMCA camp, then he fixates on a harmless little deaf man, carries on like a fool. Hard to know what makes a man tick.
Well, Winter thought, let’s go back to work. Or maybe he said it. These days when he was alone he wasn’t too sure whether his ruminations took speech.
“Who you talking with in there, Judge?” Margaret Johnston asked through the half-open office door.
“Just thinking out loud, I guess, Margaret.”
Sam shrugged, put on his black robe and his solemn face, ran a hand through his shock of grey hair and walked out of his chambers.
He gave Margaret about a quarter of a smile as he strode by her desk. She stared after him.
Poodie James made his flopping way across the concrete toward the low end of the pool. Sometimes the lifeguards blew their whistles and shook their heads when the children splashed him, but they didn’t know how the children enjoyed it and how happy the children made him. The times he liked best in the pool were when Marcie or one of the other lifeguards let him in early in the morning before anyone else came and he could swim up and down, turn after turn, and get lost in the feeling of the water. Swimming in the river was hard and he had to fight against it and sometimes there would be places that turned him around and tried to pull him down. The pool was nicer, but the river called to him. Now, the children wanted to splash him and watch him float and he could feel the sun hot on his face. Down at the other end, boys did cannonballs off the diving boards and he could see the lifeguards blowing their whistles.
He thought about work. In hot weather, finding bottles and newspapers was easy. In winter his cabin had wind in it and he had to stay in bed to keep warm. Pulling his wagon through the ice and snow was cold work. In the winter, at the library, they let him stay for a long time. That’s where he read about the whales and Egypt and a lot of other things. At the library he saw a picture of President Truman in the paper. The story said the President was coming on the train. That’s how Poodie knew to be at the station with all the other people. He waved at the President, and Mr. Truman waved back.
#
The big window in Torgerson Packard’s office faced the avenue. A glass wall looked out on the show room. Pete Torgerson liked to keep an eye on his town and his salesmen. Torgerson walked to the door.
“Irv, may I see you, please?”
Irv Wilkinson looked at the floor for a few seconds, then slowly turned toward the office. Torgerson’s frame filled the doorway. He was smiling. His eyes had the color and warmth of flint.
“Those people didn’t buy a car, did they Irv?”
“They said they’d be back tomorrow, Mr. Torgerson.”
“They won’t be back, Irv. They’ll go down the street to Pearson’s and buy a Mercury, maybe even a Lincoln, because you didn’t cinch that deal, Irv. You’ve got to cinch those deals, Irv.”
“I do my best.”
“Your best is going to have to get better, Irv. You call those people tonight and you get ’em back in here tomorrow. You tell ’em you’ll make a deal they’ll like, Irv. I want to see ’em sitting at that table signing things.”
“They’re from up the river.”
“You find ’em. You get ’em in here again. You sell ’em a Packard.”
“I’ll do my best, Mr. Torgerson.”
“I know you will, Irv.”
The salesman turned back into the show room. Torgerson’s voice tracked him.
“Irv, I just know you will.”
Maybe it was because times were good, Torgerson thought, or maybe it was because the mayor job brought him attention, but Packard sales were up almost 20 percent over two years ago. A third of the way through his first term, he was mapping out his next campaign. Only I’ll really run, he thought. Last time was a fluke, I know that. Ken Spear, he’s the one who could take it away, but I don’t think he realizes it. Somebody will tell him. You can count on that, because a lot of people would like me out. I piss off too many of them. But, that’s what happens when you make waves in a little town.
Torgerson looked up from his musing. Poodie James was passing in front of the window. Torgerson moved through the show room and out onto the sidewalk just as Poodie stopped his wagon and reached into the used car lot for a Coke bottle standing in front of a ’41 Ford Roadster. Torgerson charged over and stepped in front of him.
“Get out of my lot,” he yelled. “Go on, get out of here. Go on.”
Poodie grinned at Torgerson, gestured with the bottle, pointed at the spot by the Ford’s tire and grunted an explanation.
“Put that bottle back where you found it and get on out of here.” Poodie watched intently as Torgerson indicated the tire. His face darkened. Torgerson saw the little man’s neck muscles working. He advanced a step. Poodie moved his grip to the neck of the bottle and lowered it to his side.
“I don’t want you around here. Go on.”
Poodie’s gaze was intent on Torgerson’s face. For thirty seconds the tall man and the short one were as motionless as posts, then Poodie put the bottle precisely where it had been and paddled off down the avenue toward First Street, resuming his explanation, looking back to smile again at Torgerson. A woman passing by slowly shook her head at the mayor, a commentary he interpreted in his favor as he launched a scowl at the little man.
That smile. He knows, Torgerson thought. The dumb little bastard has always known.
#
Winifred Stone regarded her managing editor for a long time before she spoke.
“The facts are, Sonny, that mentioning Mr. Truman favorably does not constitute an endorsement, the election is two months away, and the man came here and made himself look pretty good. I know the Republicans in this valley about as well as you do, I think, and I know that if we say one good thing about him, we’ll get a dozen letters in tomorrow’s morning mail. At least four of them will call me a Communist, and I can tell you who the writers will be. If I could get that dam built and avoid being hanged in the street, I guess I can survive a few good words about the President of the United States. This meeting of the editorial board is over. Run it as we have discussed.”
“One other thing,” her son said. “Pete Torgerson has been rasing hell to anyone who’ll listen about the hobos camping along the tracks.”
“As they have been since the railroad punched through here in 1892.”
“Well, he says they’re bothering people and causing a fire hazard. He’s going to try to get the council to tell Chief Spanger to clean em out of there and get the railroad bulls to start whackin’ on ’em.”
“Not a lot for a mayor to do in a town this size, is there?” Winifred said.
He wants the council to tell the chief to go after other people living along the river. Poodie James, for instance.”
“Poodie James never hurt a fly.”
“Right. What should we do?
“Do?” As she thought, Winifred tapped the earpiece of her reading glasses against her lower front teeth. “We’ll keep an eye on it, that’s what we’ll do. The only problem with Poodie is that he’s going to go down in one of those currents if he can’t stay out of that damn river.”
Winifred Stone had the posture and nearly the same figure as when she and Jeremy came from Chicago in July of 1903. Seven months pregnant, standing on a hilltop in the dust and the dry wind, she cried when he showed her the valley that day. Except for a few scattered orchards, it was as raw as an open heat blister. She wanted to be back on the balcony of her house on Lakeshore Drive, watching sailboats tack in the Lake Michigan breeze, not stifling in air as parched as an oven’s. She thought Jeremy was raving when he told her it would be one of the most beautiful places on earth. Water would do it, he said. It was on the way. The hills would be covered with blossoms in the spring and big red apples in the fall. As he spoke, Jeremy swept his hat across the horizon and it seemed to her that in his height, his leanness and idealism, he towered over the valley. They were going to help it happen, he said, because there was no limit to what a newspaper could accomplish if it believed in itself and its people.
At first, her new husband’s enthusiasm embarrassed a girl plucked out of Chicago society and set down among the scrub brush and boulders of a western valley. Then she caught his ambition like a contagion. Side by side, she and Jeremy made a scraggly weekly into The Daily Dispatch. Sonny was in a crib between their desks as they wrote stories. When they set type, he was in a play pen far enough from the linotype to be safe if there was a splash of lead. When Jeremy’s publisher work led him deeper into business circles and he ended up more interested in banking and promoting the community than in newspapering, Winifred took over The Daily Dispatch. She assumed power and responsibility more easily than anything she had ever experienced, including—emphatically including—childbirth. Winifred could still feel the hundred-degree heat of the August day when Sonny was born. She looked out into the newsroom at her son conferring with Boyce Green, the copy editor. Oh, he had school and sports and girls, but it seemed to Winifred that Sonny did his growing up in the newsroom and the press room, on delivery trucks, selling ads, learning the mysteries of circulation. Sonny was 45 now, she thought with a start, three years back from the war that he volunteered for as a 38-year-old father of two. He was a superb managing editor. The paper was going to be in good hands when his time came.
Winifred and Jeremy owned the paper, but for eighteen years his biggest role in it had been to share in the earnings. When he discovered to his astonishment that his heart was elsewhere, he told her, ”You run the paper, Babe, and I’ll make the money.” She and Sonny ran the paper, and they all made money. She hadn’t asked Jeremy’s business advice for years. They kept to their agreement, rarely discussing the paper’s affairs. When they had to talk business, they made appointments at one another’s offices. At home, they cooked, did a little gardening, read and made love.
The Stones were rich and independent. The fruit barons needed the bank and the newspaper as much as the bank and the newspaper needed the growers’ business and prosperity. The orchardists, the packers, the farmers of the reclaimed desert east of the river, thought the paper’s streak of Democratic politics on the editorial page was a black eye for the valley, but they knew that they would-n’t have the irrigation that made apples and sugar beets if Winifred Stone hadn’t raised twenty-eight kinds of hell. The state’s senators in Washington, D.C. pushed President Roosevelt for the appropriations that got the dam started. Everyone who grew apples knew that Winifred Stone and The Daily Dispatch pushed the senators.
The barrel of his chest straining the buttons of his faded Hawaiian shirt, his frayed khaki shorts held up by an Army surplus webbed belt, Poodie made his rounds, adding bottles and old newspapers to the stock in his wagon. He was trying to think of a way to make the mayor like him. Most people were friendly. Some ignored him or looked away embarrassed, worried that he would approach and ask for something, but Pete Torgerson yelled at him. Nearly everyone knew about his deafness, knew he lived in a shack down by the river. A few encouraged him to pick up bottles and papers from back porches or corners of sheds. Poodie moved along, his wagon following like a dog on a leash. The mailmen and garbage collectors knew the town no better than he did. He pulled his wagon the length and breadth of the town, making side trips into alleys, retrieving bundles of papers, rummaging through garbage cans for bottles. When the wagon was full to the top of its stakes, he hauled it below the tracks to a rusting tin shed in a field between a foundry and a freight warehouse. He watched a dusty old man box the bottles, weigh the papers on his iron scale and count out a handful of change from the coin purse he extracted from the pocket of his leather apron.
2.
APRIL 5
They think, “You could hear if you wanted to. The bottles, the wagon, the smile, running around town. It beats working, doesn’t it?” They don’t know that I understand their suspicions. And the people don’t know how much I like them. Sometimes it seems that I have to keep adjusting layers, inserting one, removing another, separating layers that are stuck together. Or it’s like chess, and I’m always in danger of being captured. I can’t get rid of the feeling that if I let my worry show, everything, everyone will come collapsing down on me and I will never be able to get up. Must be happy, must smile. Miss Moore at the library thinks I’m just looking at pictures in books. I’d like to check out books in Latin and French, but I’m afraid to let her know I can read them.
Poodie wrote his notes to people in short sentences and a primitive scrawl. That was his legend in the town. Appearing to be simple, that was his armor and his hope.
March 28
Always the happy elf. There is not one other deaf person in this valley. No one who knows sign language, no one who knows you can be deaf and smart. How could people know? They don’t have the privilege, the opportunity, to be deaf. Ha. Maybe someday a hearing person will take time to understand. We could have a written conversation, exchange ideas.
Summers, he stopped at parks when they were full of children at play. Children flocked around him, jabbering, listening to him jabber.
Poodie felt a tapping on his knee and awoke from his nap on the grass behind the big rock fireplace in the park. Four brown eyes peered at him, small ones atop a suggestion of a nose and lips drawn taut in seriousness, a big pair above a shiny black nose and a tongue dripping out of a panting mouth. The dog was sitting, the boy standing, his head no higher than his companion’s, his arm around its shoulder, his thumb hooked through its collar. “Ride,” Poodie saw the child say as he pointed at the wagon. He sat up stretching, and put on his straw hat. The boy tottered over and began removing bottles one at a time, setting them on the grass. Poodie hefted a stack of newspapers, put them by the bottles, lifted the boy into the wagon and helped the dog scramble aboard. He placed the boy’s hands, one on a stake, the other on the dog’s collar, and walked forward to the handle. “Ready?” he grunted. “Ride,” the child said, “ride,” and Poodie pulled away slowly toward the bushy margin between the main park and the ball field. Around the end of the bushes they went, southward behind the backstop and the bench where ballplayers sat intent on the game, the boy waving and telling the dog to look at the ball game, the dog barking. They passed the merry-go-round, the swings, the slide, went between the rest rooms, up the hill back into the grassy part of the park, around the drinking fountain, past the wading pool full of splashers, around the pool, Poodie and the child waving to the young mothers watching, under the chinup bar by the huge Chinese elm, around the tree, onto the sidewalk, the dog barking, the boy singing and laughing, Poodie pulling backward now, watching his passengers, smiling, making noises that might have been singing, his face and chest moist in the summer heat, his bare belly framed by his open Hawaiian shirt ragged and covered with faded birds and flowers, back to the fireplace and a line of children waiting their turn.
In spring, when the fruit trees were in bloom, he pulled his wagon into the hills beyond the orchards, took it off the roads and onto trails along canals high above the valley. He looked across the blossoming acres, the blocks of houses, the streets with their tiny automobiles, the two hotels soaring above the downtown, the river radiant in the sunlight, the patchwork of green and brown sweeping up to the dry bench land on the other side. Behind him, agglomerations of rock like battlements of castles punctuated the skyline of the foothills. Sitting on his wagon by a canal, Poodie thought of the day when he first saw this land from the train, the certainty and excitement when he watched a woman say, “He must be home.”
#
On his third birthday, Peter James’s mother began teaching him to read. When he was five, she persuaded the library to ignore its regulations and give him his own card. A year later, polio bent his legs, impeded his growth, took his hearing and ended his schooling. He was in the hospital for six months. His mother spent her days in his room. Most nights, she slept there. She wrote her soldier husband about the boy’s paleness and bravery, about her worry and exhaustion. The doctors said nothing could be done about Peter’s deafness. Didn’t she understand, they asked his mother, that he was lucky to have survived? When he returned home, she spent hours every day writing him notes, stimulating his curiosity, shepherding him through books that other children his age would not read for years. She taught him Latin and French. During his ninth year, he surprised his mother by handing her a note that said, “Buenos dias, Mamacita. Como estás?” and grinned as he took Hugo’s Spanish Simplified from its hiding place. He could feel her waves of laughter as she engulfed him in a hug. Night after night in his dreams her hair fell across his face, and he was wrapped in her touch, her scent, her joy.
Maude James died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, six months after a shell blew her husband apart outside Paris in the second battle of the Marne. Her relatives shuttled Poodie from one set to another for a year, but none of them was willing to tolerate the bother of a ten-year-old who was into everything, couldn’t talk, wasn’t fit for school. His mother’s elderly cousin and his wife were the last in the succession of foster parents. They resigned themselves to raising the boy in their drafty little house at the water’s edge. Then illness sent the old man to his bed. In a panic, his wife arranged for Peter to enter the state school for the deaf, a collection of brick buildings in the fog on a bluff at the edge of a forest of dripping firs and sodden undergrowth. In seven years at the school, Poodie learned to read lips and use sign language. He studied Latin and French and spent hours each week in the library. He learned shoe repair, leather working, carpentry and printing. He swam on the school’s team, stroking endless laps up and down the big pool in the natatorium. He was one of the happiest children ever to have lived at the school, and one of the most independent, so hard-headed that he countered all efforts to channel him into a vocation. Other students went off to jobs in shoe shops, apprenticed themselves to carpenters, found work with printers. After he was graduated, Poodie used part of his stipend to buy a ticket east to the dry side of the state, fleeing the drizzle and mist. The train came out of the mountains into the valley lying in the spring sun under apple blossoms as under a snowfall. The river ran broad and gleaming past the town. He turned to the other passengers, laughing and pointing out the window.
“He must be home,” he saw a woman say.
“Home,” he repeated, the only word they could understand in his stream of sounds as he got off at the depot. He walked around the town with his canvas suitcase, smiling at everyone he met. Home, he thought, home.
Poodie slept on a bench in the depot. After three nights, the station master gave him a note. He would have to stay somewhere else, it wasn’t a hotel. Struggling through the scrawl of Poodie’s reply, the station master saw that he had nowhere to go and only a little money for food. “Home now,” the note said. “This is my place now,” it said, and “Need work.”
“Ruthie,” the station master’s brother said to his wife that evening, “that young fella out there is Poodie James. Can’t talk much, and can’t hear. Been sleeping down at the station, but John was going to get in trouble with the Great Northern if he let him stay. Willing to do some work around the place for a bed and meals. Could have one of the pickers cabins for a while and we’ll see how he does. Use some help with the ditching anyway.”
Ruth Thorp scrubbed carrots as she looked out the kitchen window to the edge of the orchard where Poodie stood.
“Isn’t much to him, is there? What is he, five-two, five-three?”
“’Bout it. Doesn’t walk so good, either. Sort of waggles along.”
“Poodie? Kinda name is that?”
“The one he has.”
“What’s he smiling at?”
“Never seems to turn it off.”
“Is he okay? I mean, with the kids. Can’t take any chances with the kids.”
“We’ll keep an eye on him, but I think you’ll feel good about him. Sort of gets to you. John never let anyone sleep in the station before. Look, he’s waving at you.”
Ruth was trying to be cautious, but she smiled back and blushed to find herself waving a carrot.
“Dan, you really know how to pick ’em. Tell him we’ll eat in half an hour.”
Dinner ran long. The little Thorps stared as Poodie ate, giggling when he asked for more, laughing when he strangulated and grinned his way through a sentence. Their parents’ shushing had little effect. After dessert, the twins insisted that their older brother and Poodie stand back to back. The 12-year-old and Poodie were the same height. Later, he and his folks sat on the porch and watched as Poodie hauled the little girl and boy in their wagon up and down the lane, the three of them talking at top speed as if they were having a conversation. The next morning, Poodie followed Dan Thorp through the orchard and learned how the ditches delivered water to the apple trees and how to keep them clear. Thorp put him in charge of a shovel. When he came back from a trip into town that afternoon, he brought Poodie a pair of rubber boots. Poodie laughed with the rest at his stubby legs rising out of shiny black tubes.
Poodie James took to orchard work and to the Thorps. He was a help with the irrigation and learned to patrol the ditches, repairing cave-ins and clearing clogs. Soon, he knew every tree in the orchard and adopted favorite spots for napping on hot summer afternoons. Boughs of apples hung over the lane, so loaded with fruit that they had to be propped. Sunlight dodged through the leaves and stippled the floor of the orchard. The children picked asparagus and the dogs ran barking between the rows of trees. The adult Thorps lounged on the porch after supper when shadows crept up from the river and through the rows. As the twilight blended into darkness, the children played tag among the trees. Poodie sat in his cabin reading books from the library. He read about ancient Egypt, about whales, about the cultivation of apples.
As the fruit grew, he rode beside Thorp on the big flatbed wagon loaded with wooden props. He helped place the supports and groaned when apples fell to the ground.
“Nothing to worry about, Poodie,” Thorp told him. It unnerved him when Poodie’s gaze locked onto his face, but he was getting used to it. ”The trees have to thin themselves. If they don’t do it enough, we come along later and help them. Can’t have the branches breaking.”
That first summer with the Thorps, when he was 17, Poodie explored beyond the east edge of the orchard, among the scrub brush and the glacial boulders along the river. Thorp taught him to keep an eye out for rattlers. The river’s edge was punctuated by inlets with pools where trout rested and fed. Thorp and the older boy showed him how to put a worm on a hook and catch a fish. At the school he had become a strong swimmer. Thorp found him swimming in one of the big pools the Columbia had scoured, and summoned him onto the bank.
“Look at me,” he said. “Poodie, stay out of that river. That old river is dangerous. Be pulled under in a second. Never know what hapened to you. That’s no friendly river when you’re in it. You just stay out of it.”
Two mornings later, Poodie swam it for the first time. The familiar thrill of buoyancy ran through him when his feet left the sandy bottom of the pool. As he entered the channel, the pull of the Columbia took him. His heart raced, and a moment passed before he began to kick and stroke, setting his course at an angle upstream toward the east bank. Now that he was in it, the river seemed wider and faster. Poodie settled into a rhythm, rolling his head to the side with every other stroke, taking air deep into his chest. The water was warmer than he expected, but he passed through patches cold as ice. In midstream, he stopped to tread water and avoid a conglomeration of wood that looked like a section of a house. A few yards farther on, he felt a tugging from below, a force that frightened him. The crossing was taking longer than he had imagined. His arms and legs were weakening, the muscles burning. He wanted to float but forced himself to keep swimming. Twenty feet from the bank, he swam into an eddy that spun him around and spit him out. Trembling with exhaustion, gulping air, he struggled toward a scraggly cottonwood, seized an overhanging branch and held fast until he had the strength to haul himself up the bank and slump gasping onto a stretch of sand. He fought to keep his eyes open. When he awoke, the sun was directly above. He looked across the river at warehouses, the train station and the buildings of the business district. The current had carried him so far downstream, he had to walk two miles to get above the Thorp place for the return swim. Far off in a field, he saw a man stop work and lean on a shovel to watch him make his way along the bank. Poodie waved. The man returned his greeting with the tentative lift of an arm.
The river was wider and calmer where he swam back across, but he used his final ounce of energy to haul himself into the pool at the bottom of the orchard. He lay on the bank half out of the water, gulping air, fearful of what he had done, then, when he recovered, smiling. Poodie knew that Dan Thorp would be angry if he found out. He told himself that he would never swim the Columbia again. He knew that he would.
3.
GLANCING UP FROM his reading, Thorp told his wife he didn’t think Poodie was going to be much help when picking started. He was too short, he said, and his legs didn’t work quite right. He wasn’t going to be any good on a ladder. He wasn’t big enough to swamp out, couldn’t lift boxes of apples onto the flatbed. Besides, when the pickers showed up, they would need both cabins.
“Maybe he can find a real job in town,” Thorp said.
His wife walked over and looked at him across the top of The Daily Dispatch.
“You tell the kids,” she said.
The next day Thorp took took Poodie along when he toured the orchard, checking the fruit for size and color. The September air cooled a little more each night. Days, the sweat rolled off Poodie as he worked, and the dogs lay panting in the shade.
“You’re going to have company soon,” Thorp told him. “Pickers coming to get these apples off the trees. Two of them are going to stay in your cabin. They come up from Arkansas every fall, following the harvest. I know these men. They’re all right. New family’s going to be in the other cabin.”
The floppiness of their bib overalls emphasized the leanness and height of the pickers who moved in with Poodie. They did not sit on their cots or get up from them, he thought; they folded and unfolded. He wondered at the length and narrowness of their heads atop sunburned necks and shoulders roped with muscle.
After Poodie made them understand that he needed to read their lips, they looked into his face when they let their slow words out but turned away when they joked about him. The sight of their laughter warmed Poodie and he encouraged them with sounds that increased their merriment. Soon, the three sat on their cots with tears rolling down their cheeks.
They were all working, the tall, sinewy pickers from Arkansas, the family of five from west of the mountains, the three big Thorps and Poodie. The orchard was alive with picking and hauling. The apples went from the bags into the boxes, and the boxes had to be moved out. Dan Thorp took a chance that Poodie would be able to control the horse. The pickers laughed when Poodie grunted his commands, but the horse responded to his inflections and moved the wagonload of boxes down the lane to the shed beyond the house. When the harvest was done, Thorp paid the pickers and asked them back for the next year. He gave Poodie the first twenty dollar bill he had ever seen. Poodie laughed and carried on for half an hour. He showed the money to everyone in the family. He showed it to the pickers. He showed it to the horse. He hid it in his suitcase and went down to look at the river and think about his good fortune.
Over the next few years, Poodie learned about sprays, pollenization, storage and, to Dan Thorp’s surprise, the intricacies of pruning and grafting. He worked alongside Dan in the orchard and helped Ruth look after the twins. In his third year with the Thorps, they allowed him to stay with the twins when they and their older boy visited relatives in Seattle. He was part of the family and he was becoming part of the town. When the pickers and Thanksgiving had gone in 1928 and Christmas came, the Thorps presented Poodie with a wagon that Dan found in a trash heap and spent evenings rebuilding and painting. It was half again bigger than the twins’ wagon, red with yellow wheels, fitted with wooden stakes. Poodie spent Christmas afternoon pulling it up and down the lane through the snow, into the horse shed, through the storage barn, around the house. He gave the Thorps rides in the lane, the adults one at a time, the children all together.
“My god, he’s strong,” Ruth said. “I didn’t know he was so strong.”
“It’s the work,” Dan said, “and the swimming. Look at those shoulders. He’s powerful in the water. Swam the river both ways last summer, twice that I know of. Raised hell with him about it, but I think he’s going to do it no matter what. At the pool in town nearly every morning too, swimming laps.”
#
In the sun’s final benediction of the day, the plateau beyond the Columbia glowed orange, floating above the dusk that filled the valley. Engine Fred stared into his fire. Poodie sat twenty feet away against a small boulder, waiting for the hobo to stir, watching the flames and their reflection in the big man’s steel rimmed glasses. He thoughtthatEngineFred’sgraysuitand hatwerelikeJudge Winter’s, but rumpled and dirty, and he had never seen the Judge wear a plaid shirt or go without shaving. Poodie leaned back to watch the nighthawks swoop and dart. Straining to reach into his memory of sounds, he wondered if the birds sang as they swept through the air. He found no birdsong, only his mother’s voice and the rustling of leaves on the big trees outside their house, sounds always in the background of his mind. When he dreamed, the sounds grew louder and carried pictures. His mother left so long ago, he sometimes lost her face when he thought about her. He missed her singing and the way she held him and looked into his eyes and read to him and laughed when he tried to say Peter and it came out Poodie.
The scents of smoke and sagebrush filled his nostrils. Now, the hills across the river were dark shapes against the dark sky. Poodie felt the rumble of a freight train moving slowly on the tracks behind him. Engine Fred looked up, glowered and said something too far away for Poodie to read in the dim light of the little fire.
Swinging down from the boxcar as he followed his bedroll and pack onto the right of way, Old Sam saw a figure moving through the jungle toward the tracks. When he realized it was Engine Fred, he turned to hop back on the train, but it was too late. The caboose was passing.
“Sam, you son of a bitch,” Fred shouted.
“Now, Engine, don’t do nothin’. I got what I owe you, and more. It’s right here in my pack. Don’t think too harsh about me. Other night in Pocatello, I was drunk. Ain’t you never been drunk?
“Yeah, but I’ve never been a son of a bitch stew bum like you.”
“I’m makin’ it up to you, Engine, right now. Look here, it’s more’n I stole. It’s two whole pints, and I only took one. It’s all for you. Good stuff, too.”
Old Sam shuffled back from his pack as Engine Fred approached. He took off his faded red baseball cap and held it to his chest. Above a half smile, his eyes were wild with worry.
“Sam, you no good son of a bitch,” Engine Fred said, “I’ve been sitting here hoping you’d show up tonight so I could pound you into little pieces and leave you scattered among the rocks to feed the rattlers.” He advanced a step, then two. He towered over the skinny man. “But you’re old and pitiful, and you brought whiskey. And, besides, we have a guest.”
Engine Fred turned and walked back toward the fire, indicating Poodie as he passed him.
“This is Poodie. He lives down there in that orchard, and he brought me apples, as he always does, because he’s a decent person, not like some I know. We have apples and whiskey and a fire and Poodie’s company, so come on and choose your spot.”
“Aw, Engine, I knew you’d be kind to Old Sam. And I won’t take nothin’ of yours again, honest.”
“Not until next time you’re drunk, I’ll bet,” Engine Fred said. “Now, Poodie can’t hear. When you say something, you look right at him so he can read your lips. He’s good at that, and he’s smart, too, went to a special school, and he’s got a nice job working for the man who owns that orchard.”
“Dogies, he’s a lucky one, ain’t he,” Old Sam said, arranging himself and his belongings near the fire, “not bein’ deaf, I mean, but bein’ smart and workin’. Lots of folks ain’t neither. Me, for instance.”
“Sam, you’re smart enough. You wouldn’t work if your life depended on it. You been a proper stiff all your miserable life?”
“Only since I was old enough to leave home fifty years ago. ‘Bout you?”
“Oh,” Engine Fred said as he uncapped one of the pints, “I had a job, a wife, kids, a house, dogs, even a car. They had me, really. I left all that behind. I had to get out from under.”
“Think you’ll ever go back to it?’
“If I did, it wouldn’t be there.”
Poodie watched, intent on the conversation, marveling that these men rode freight trains, lived in the open, begged for food, did odd jobs, wanted no home, and he had found a home. Engine Fred offered him whiskey out of his tin cup.
“Just a sip, see how you like it.”
Engine Fred and Old Sam laughed at Poodie’s grimace and the tears in his eyes.
“You’ll get used to it,” Old Sam said, peering at Poodie’s face. Poodie shook his head and made low sounds. He got out his pad and pencil, wrote, tore off the sheet and handed it to the old man. Old Sam studied it, shrugged and passed the note to Engine Fred.
“What’s it say, Engine?”
“It says, ‘No more of that.’ See, Sam, I told you he was smart.”
#
Two nights later, Poodie made his way up to the jungle carrying a bag of apples. As he came around the big boulder at the path’s final turn, he saw Old Sam cowering near the bonfire, trying to shield his head from the blows of a big man in black clothing wielding a club, a cloth tied over his nose and mouth, his hat pulled low. Sam twisted, arched his back, tried to tuck his chin into his chest. The man kicked at Sam’s groin and aimed the club at his ribs, chest and face. Poodie dropped the apples and stood frozen. The man suspended his club in mid-strike and looked at Poodie. All that Poodie could see of his face was eyes reflecting the firelight. The attacker started toward him, then turned and ran toward the tracks. Poodie rushed to Sam. The old man’s neck was bloody. He was gasping. Poodie felt up and down Sam’s rib cage and arms and examined his face.
“Ain’t nothin’ busted, I reckon,” he saw Sam say. “He was just gettin’ started. Sure am glad you showed up. Gimme a hand here, pardner.” Sam winced as Poodie helped him to his feet. “I heard tell about ‘bo’s gettin’ whacked around here lately by some feller. Don’t seem real hospitable, somehow. Shoulda gone with Engine Fred when he took off this afternoon.”
Poodie sat with Old Sam until a swallow of whiskey helped calm the hobo, then he gathered up the old man’s bedroll and pack and motioned him to follow. Old Sam spent the night on Poodie’s cabin floor and hopped a westbound train the next morning.
“Goin’ someplace where folks don’t get so riled,” he said.
4.
AS THE 1929 CROP was being harvested, the stock market crashed. Apple prices dropped. In the fall of 1930, Thorp was able to hire only the two lean pickers from Arkansas. Poodie’s bonus was five dollars. In 1931, hiring pickers was out of the question. The Thorps and the Gellardys down the road teamed up to get one another’s apples off the trees. Poodie began collecting bottles and old newspapers to sell and help out with food money. When he showed up at Gritzinger’s market with a load of empty soft drink and beer bottles, Ralph Gritzinger gave him a penny apiece for them and hired him to come in early mornings to sweep up. By the end of the first week, he had Poodie stocking the lower shelves while Ralph did the ones above. Poodie brought his wagon in to haul the cans, bottles and boxes down the aisles. Gritzinger raised his pay to fifteen cents an hour.
In the summer of 1932, for the first time Thorp missed a payment on the farm. The 1933 crop brought practically no money. In June of 1934, Jeremy Stone edged his Chrysler up the lane and found Dan behind the shed mixing spray dope. The air went out of Thorp and he slumped back against the tank when Stone told him his bank had no choice but to foreclose. A month was what they could give him. Thorp asked if Poodie could stay in the cabin until a new owner took over the orchard. Jeremy agreed. Dan sagged toward the house with his news. As he opened the kitchen door, Ruth said, “I know. Bankers don’t make social calls on Friday afternoons.”
When the day came, Thorp and Poodie and the older boy put the furniture on the flatbed under a canvas, roped it in place and hooked the trailer to the Model A. Dan’s cousin in Seattle had a place they could stay and thought he might be able to get him a job in a shipyard. Poodie watched the twins in the rear wndow, waving as the car turned onto the road. He stood in the lane for half an hour, looking at the spot where the Thorps had disappeared. That fall’s crop stayed on the trees until the apples dropped and the snow covered them.
#
“There goes that man with his wagon,” Winifred Stone looked up from her book at her husband in the other lawn chair, “the little man from the old Thorp place down by the river. I’ve never seen him in our alley before. Jeremy, hop up and see if that box of old bottles is still in the garage. Poor man, I don’t see how he gets along on what he makes from peoples’ leavings.”
“Poodie James,” Jeremy said as he headed toward the back of the yard. “He’s doing things around Gritzingers, and he has free rent until we can sell the property. Alice Moore down at the library tells me he’s in there reading most afternoons. Swims at the city pool. Thorp said he swam across the river. I see him downtown all the time. Can’t hear, you know.” Now he was at the side door of the garage.
“Not so loud, Jeremy.”
“He can’t hear, Babe.”
“The neighbors can.”
Stone caught up with Poodie, displayed a palm and mouthed, “wait.” Poodie nodded, smiling up at him. Jeremy felt a glow on his face. When he brought the bottles out of the garage, Poodie delivered a symphony of throat sounds that Jeremy understood to mean thank you. Winifred watched from her lawn chair as Poodie scraped down the alley.
Two and a half years later, Poodie was startled early one morning to see men outside his cabin with axes and saws. He threw on his shirt, shorts and sandals and stepped out to find Jeremy Stone watching six men taking down trees. He hurried over to Stone and looked up into his face.
“No one wants to farm down here any more, Poodie,” the banker said. “We can’t sell the orchard and we can’t leave it to become diseased and die. Some day the land will be used for something else.”
Stone saw the alarm in Poodie’s eyes.
“Don’t worry. You can stay in your cabin,” he said. “I’ll see to that.”
Poodie scurried into the cabin and returned with his pad and pencil.
“Glad about cabin,” he scribbled. “Thank you. But no trees bad. Need trees. Keep these?”
Stone looked at six trees behind and to the sides of the cabin. He walked over to the cabin steps and sat looking at Poodie. He motioned him closer.
All right. They are your responsibility. Watering, pruning, picking, everything. If the trees don’t get care, they have to come out.”
“Okay,” Poodie laughed as he wrote. “My trees. Good care.”
The crew sawed the orchard into firewood. They uprooted the stumps and dragged them into piles for burning. When the men finished their work, they dumped two cords of apple wood next to the cabin. Poodie stacked it beneath the eaves. That November, he watched the heaps of stumps smouldering and pictured the children playing long ago in the orchard. In the smoke he saw the night of his first summer there when three men came into his cabin and pulled him out of bed. He dreamed about them, their laughing faces indistinct in the moonlight.
The door knob. After so many years, Poodie remembered it. He had just turned over in bed and his eyes opened for one semiconscious moment. Moonlight flooded through the window and he saw the door knob turn. He sank back into sleep, then they were yanking the covers off and pulling him out of bed by his feet. His head hit the edge of the cot and slammed onto the floor. He felt the heat of friction on his backside, and his spine raked over the door jamb. He tried to raise up, but they jerked him backward down the step and onto the ground. The clubbing began. He wrapped his arms around hisheadand tucked intoaball. Twoofthemstraightened his body by pulling his hands and feet while the biggest man alternated kickswithblows from alengthofwood.The clubsand boots battered his arms and legs, his torso, his shoulders. The pain was like fire on his skin. The ache went to the center of his bones. They let him go, then knocked him off his feet when he got up, laughing at his contortions when he twisted and thrashed to evade their clubs. They were killing him, he thought. He was going to die.
Suddenly, the big man was on his back and Engine Fred was on top of him with a forearm bearing down on his windpipe. Poodie sat up and saw the other two running down the lane. His head throbbed. Three more hobos came down along the path from the jungle. The man on the ground got an arm free, knocked Engine Fred off balance and was up and running away. He disappeared into the orchard, headed toward the river. Two of the hobos ran after him, but came back shaking their heads. It all happened in the space of a few minutes. The Thorps slept through it, but Engine Fred told Poodie that he heard a scream. Poodie didn’t know that he was capable of screaming.
Dan Thorp called the police the next morning. By then, the hobos had hopped a freight. Poodie could not identify the thugs. The bruises on his face and body took weeks to heal. Thorp put a lock on the cabin door. The attack was the worst thing that had happened to Poodie since his mother died. He lived it over in his dreams night after night for months. Years later, he still awakened in fear that the men would come back.
#
Alice Moore looked up to see Poodie James’s face floating just above surface of the checkout desk, a stack of books next to it. She had never seen that face without a smile. She looked at the books; Howard Carter’s The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen, three books about whales, a collection of de Maupassant stories.
“Poodie, this book is in the French language,” she told him. We have it in English. I’ll get it for you.”
Poodie concentrated on her face, shook his head, started to reply, shook it again, reached for his pad and pencil and scribbled.
“Want French. Need practice. Forgetting.” He handed the pad to Miss Moore.
“Do you speak French, Poodie?”
His answer was a convulsion of vowels. Heads at the reading desks turned toward them.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and put her finger to her lips.
Poodie wrote, “I said, ‘Oui, madame. Et vous?’”
“Well,” she whispered, “I understand that, but not much more. How...where…?”
Poodie held up his palm and began writing.
“Mother taught me. Studied at deaf school, too. Reading okay. Writing okay. Pronunciation bad.”
She studied the pad and laughed.
“Why, Poodie, a joke. How nice.”
Miss Moore watched him walk out and went to the window. She saw him place the pile of books in his wagon and give them a pat.
5.
POODIE STOOD WITH President Truman as the train pulled away from the depot. They waved at the people. Mayor Torgerson and Chief Spanger broke out of the crowd and ran after the train, pointing at Poodie. The chief had a pistol in his hand and the mayor screamed at him. The chief shook his head, then stopped running. As they grew small, the mayor was still running, waving his arms. The President smiled at Poodie and ushered him from the observation platform into the car. Mrs. Truman and Margaret asked Poodie to sit, and a man in a white jacket served tea and cookies. Mrs. Truman read to him from a book that she held in her lap, read with a soft voice that he could plainly hear. As she read, her face became his mother’s face, and now and then she put down the book and sang to him. He and Margaret conversed in French. The President sat beaming at Poodie. They crossed mountains, skimmed along the ocean shore, passed through cities, rocked over rivers and through endless fields of wheat. When the train stopped in front of the White House, the President helped Poodie get his wagon down the steps, and the four of them walked inside. In the President’s office, Poodie sat in a chair facing the desk. The President interrupted his telephone conversations to ask Poodie what he thought about communism, how to help Europe recover from the war, what to do about making the Army treat black people better, whether he could beat Thomas Dewey.
Poodie pulled the President in his wagon in the gardens and on the lawns behind the White House. Mr. Truman waved to people on the other side of the big wrought iron fence and told Poodie to wave too. Poodie and the President went into the shrubbery and changed into their swimming suits. Mr. Truman’s trunks were blue and red with white stars. They slid into the Potomac and swam side by side. The river flowed slowly. It had no whirlpools, no strong currents. Trees covered with pink blossoms grew down to the far bank. People waved from boats passing by. President Truman was on the deck of a big boat in his white suit, hat and bow tie, hands cupped around his mouth, shouting at Poodie, pointing downriver, shouting again, pointing, shouting, pointing, shouting. The boat grew farther away. It became a pinpoint. Poodie stroked as hard as he could. The trees on the bank were a pink blur as he went over the falls, down, down, down through the mist.
6.
PETE TORGERSON WAS born in 1901, the second of six children in the family of a fisherman and his wife who came to the United States in the great migration from Norway. Like hundreds of other Norwegians, his parents settled on the hills above Puget Sound in Ballard, ten years before it became a part of Seattle. The smartest and the moodiest of the young Torgersons, Peter worked the hardest. Summers from the time he was thirteen, he helped his father on the boat. When their wills clashed, Peter submitted, smouldering, and doubled his effort.
“Peter wants to fight me,” Ivar Torgerson told his wife one July night the year the boy turned sixteen. “I see it in his eyes. But he does the work good. That’s what counts.”
Along the docks of Salmon Bay, the fishermen said, “Keep an eye on the Torgersons. The kid’s going to be as good as the old man. He’s got a sense about where the fish are running. And look how he handles that boat, it’s a pleasure to see. Yah, I wish my boys learned so good. Ivar’s a lucky fella.”
Following Pete’s high school graduation, his dad signed him on as his right-hand man. In early 1918 the draft took Torgerson away, but not far from home. He was training in the 13th Infantry Division at the new Fort Lewis near Tacoma when the war ended. A couple of inches taller than his six-foot father, with the same pale blue-grey eyes, he returned to fishing full of ideas and ambition, his independence hardened.
“Dad, I’ve been thinking,” he said one evening as they came back into the bay, “we ought to try a power gurdy. I don’t know if it would control the lines any better, but it would speed things up.”
“I don’t trust them. The hand gurdy is fine.”
“But, Dad…..”
“Peter. I said the hand gurdy will do for us.”
“Look, I’ll pay for it. If you don’t like it, it goes, and it doesn’t cost you anything.”
“No. I said no.” The steel of stubborness was in the old man’s voice. “That’s the end of it.”
Evenings when the boat was in port, Peter rarely had supper with his folks. He roamed. After midnight, they heard his quiet steps on the stairs to his room.
“You must say something to him, Ivar,” his mother said. “He’s going to find trouble.”
“He’s a grown man, Hilda.”
Then, after a few weeks back on the boat and more suggestions, Pete argued with Ivar about how to do the work, occasionally at first, and after a couple of years nearly without ceasing. The change in his son troubled Ivar Torgerson. A scowl seemed engraved on the face of the young man. Eagerness for work transmuted into a flow of resentment and quarreling. He swore at people who got in his way when he walked on the dock. Ivar heard reports of Peter picking fights in bars and tormenting drunken Indians on the waterfront in Seattle. He heard worse too, things he would not listen to, about Peter and sailors, about the kinds of things some sailors do. At Christy’s Tavern, he knocked Hans Karlson flat when Karlson began to tell him what he’d heard. Ivar never asked his son where he went on his nights out alone. He could not bring himself to mention what he knew Karlson and the others whispered about.
On a Sunday evening, Ivar and Hilda strolled down the hill toward the bay, relishing the softness of the springtime air and the quietness of the streets. They looked in store windows, admired flower beds, ambled along the dock.