Eureka (19 page)

Leave me alone, please
.

Otis had never had much of consequence to say to the Reverend Joshua Quinter Garnett, and falling into the Chanute River hadn’t changed anything. Neither had Annabel’s therapy-motivated jarring lie about Garnett. Otis saw him as an articulate, smart, good man who meant well, mostly did well, grinned too much, and was completely irrelevant to Otis’s life.

“The doctors thought it might be helpful for me to talk to you, Otis. I realize that you and I were never what you would call great conversationalists with each other. That’s interesting,
because we’re about the same age. I’m fifty-eight, you’re fifty-nine …”

I am? Great! I’m not sixty yet!

Garnett paused in the apparent hope that Otis might speak or otherwise respond. Otis didn’t, and the minister continued.

“I’ve always appreciated your support of the church with your financial resources and your willingness to serve more than once on our board. You’ve been chairman twice through the years, haven’t you? I particularly appreciate that you are always there on Sunday morning at eleven—always in the third or fourth row, right in front of me. I must say, however, that once I began to think about it in preparation for coming here this afternoon, I was struck by a few things. I don’t recall our ever having full eye contact while I preached a sermon.”

I never heard one word you ever said
—
except “Amen” and, at the end of the service, “May the blessings of the Lord be with you,”

“I also could not recall your ever really singing out loud. You always seem to know the words to most of the hymns without looking at the hymnal, but as best as I could tell, you only mouthed the words rather than sang them. Not everyone was meant to sing.”

I was! I can sing like Johnny Mercer!

“Sally told me about the death of your father. She said you thought a God who could take away your father the way He did was not worth much. I would love the opportunity to talk about that when you are ready and able.”

Never!

“I also fully understand why you carry some guilt over the suicide of Pete Wetmore. June Wetmore, I know, feels strongly that you were not always as thoughtful and supportive toward Pete as you might have been. I remember being quite stunned by your opposition to having Pete serve on the church board.
But don’t be too hard on yourself, Otis. We’re not into the confessional like the Catholics, but I would welcome talking to you about that as well.”

Never!

Otis got stuck on the word “Catholic.” There had been only a dozen or so Catholics in Sedgwicktown, but Otis knew them and liked them, and they’d been impressive enough to earn a place in one of his ditties.

After Otis remembered that, he returned to listening to Josh Garnett long enough to hear the preacher’s parting words.

“We Methodists, as you know, leave talk of being born again mostly to our Southern Baptist and other fundamentalist protestant brethren. But theology aside, there’s something real and possible to the concept of starting life again—no matter one’s age or situation. It’s truly never too late, Otis. You can do it if you wish, right here in Eureka. I stand ready to help in any way I can. Goodbye for now, Otis.”

Buck cannot be born again here!

OTIS PICKED UP
a whiff of a soap that was startlingly familiar. He was delighted that he could recognize distinctive smells, as he had earlier with Annabel’s perfume. It was another sign of progress that he would keep to himself. For now.

“Hello, there,” said the voice that went with the smell. It was female, and it, too, was familiar.

Sharon? Could it be Sharon, the Beschloss-reading nymph by
Farnsworth Creek? He did not want to give away the fact that he could open his eyes and see pretty well. Not yet. So, through the lidded slits, he saw a woman in a white uniform. A nurse. There had been other nurses before. But they didn’t smell like this one. Sharon had said she was a nurse. He’d never asked what kind of nurse she was.

Sharon, is that you?

“They tell me you won’t even wiggle a toe for them,” said the nurse. Was it Sharon’s voice? Otis couldn’t tell for sure.

Do you recognize me? I’m the old bald guy on the scooter! I was wearing that Chiefs helmet!

“One of the doctors thinks you’re playing games with ’em, like a possum,” the woman in white said. “I told ’em I bet I could get you to move a toe.”

No!

Not even for Sharon, if it really was Sharon, would he do that. He had decided to keep his recovery mostly secret. He needed to work out a plan, to do some heavy thinking, about how to get out of here once his brain dried out a little more.

“Here it is,” she said.

Otis felt something touching him. Was that Sharon’s hand on his left big toe?

It is! Yes, it is! Sharon is fondling my toe!

Stop! Please, stop!

She said, “Oh my goodness, what is it that I see rising up there under the sheet?”

Otis knew what it was. He couldn’t prevent
that
from happening.

Then she said excitedly, loudly, proudly, “You’ve had an erection, Mr. Halstead. I’m going to go spread the great news. Dr. Tonganoxie and Dr. Severy and everybody else will be so pleased.”

All at once several people were in the room. Otis kept his eyes tightly shut, but he could hear them. It was a crowd. “Congratulations, Otis,” said Mad Severy. “Yeah, congratulations, Otis,” said Idiot Tonganoxie. There was much applause.

ONGRATULATIONS, OTIS.

That had been one of his father’s favorite things to say. Whatever Otis did, good or bad, Dad had offered his congratulations. Sometimes he’d really meant it, as Mad Severy did now, sometimes he’d meant just the opposite, as in the spirit of Idiot Tonganoxie.

Now his dad probably would have been saying:

Congratulations, Otis, for driving your motor scooter into the river.

Congratulations, Otis, for not drowning and dying.

Congratulations, Otis, for causing that deputy sheriff to have a heart attack and die.

Congratulations, Otis, for having an erection after a girl half your age fondled your left big toe.

When Otis was growing up, the congratulations had been for forgetting to shut the door to the chicken coop, running over the cat, sweeping out the storm cellar, not making the football team, getting in to KU, crashing the tractor into the barn, being valedictorian of the class, being able to sing like Johnny Mercer.

The one thing Lucas Allen Halstead did not get to do was congratulate Otis for graduating from Sedgwicktown High
School. Lucas died on graduation day, before he had a chance to say, “Congratulations, Otis.”

An unusually heavy thunderstorm, typical for late spring in Kansas, had brought much rain down on the Halstead place, just outside of town. No harm was done, though it left two inches of water on the cellar floor in the main house that Otis and his father decided to sweep and pump out before leaving for town. That, plus some unexpected mud holes at the end of their road, caused them to run late. In their haste, they went off without the Kodak Brownie his parents bought at Buck’s in Wichita especially for taking photos at commencement, which because of the weather had been moved to the high school gym.

Lucas, the proud father of an only child, was determined to have photos of this event, so as the ceremonies were about to begin, he floorboarded the family Ford pickup back toward the farm. He figured he would have time to get there and back before Otis’s valedictorian speech, which was to be something special in more ways than one. In addition to speaking a few words about the value and morals of hard work, Otis was going to lead the crowd in singing the “I’m a sunflower from the Sunflower State” refrain from “Sunflower” and then do “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” as a solo, his special Johnny Mercer way.

A twenty-two-car Santa Fe freight on the way from Hutchinson to the main line at Newton came through town just as the pastor of the Nazarene church gave the invocation. Otis heard the train off in the distance and thought it was a great coincidence that a Santa Fe train had come through at the best time to help him and his classmates graduate. Perfect sound effects.

A few minutes later, after the principal and the school board president spoke, Otis walked from his seat in the front row up
and onto the stage. He was one of forty-seven graduates of the Class of 1955 before a crowd of about three hundred people.

He said his words, led the singing of “Sunflower,” and sang his song about the coming of engine number forty-nine.

Otis looked for his father’s face in the audience but was not alarmed when he didn’t see it. Maybe Lucas was standing way in back and Otis had missed him.

After the commencement, Otis was asked by the principal and the Nazarene preacher to please come with them into the school building. His mother and some others were waiting to talk to him.

“There’s been an accident, Otis,” said the principal.

The “some others” were two county sheriff’s deputies and a Kansas highway patrolman. Otis’s mother, they said, was in an office next door.

The trooper did the talking. “Your father was trying to make the crossing there at the grain co-op before the train, and he didn’t make it. I’m sorry, son.”

One of the deputies, who looked vaguely familiar to Otis, said, “Lucas Halstead was a good man.”

Lucas Halstead
is
a good man. No. He’s no longer any kind of man.

Otis was not allowed to see the body of his father. Their blue Ford pickup had been compacted into a piece of flat metal with the forty-two-year-old body of Lucas Halstead smashed into a small, unrecognizable mess inside. That’s what Otis assumed, anyhow.

Otis was overcome with what everyone told him were normal reactions. It seemed so unfair to kill a man on the morning of his son’s graduation as valedictorian. Is there no God? If so, how could He do it with a Santa Fe train right before his son sang Johnny Mercer’s “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” like Johnny Mercer?

Otis vowed right then never again to sing anything, much less anything by or like Johnny Mercer.

Everybody, most particularly the choral teacher, Alma Stockton, told him that didn’t make sense. But to Otis, it was the only thing that day that made sense.

HIS FATHER’S DEATH
also led to Otis’s important first experience with the insurance industry.

“Florence, here is the check from Lucas’s insurance,” said the agent for Kansas Central Fire and Casualty. He was a local man named Pratt who was well known and well liked by the Halsteads and most other farm families around Sedgwicktown. He said, “The policy had technically lapsed, but the company agreed to pay up anyhow.”

The policy had lapsed, but the company agreed to pay up anyhow?

Mr. Pratt explained to Otis’s mother what had happened.

“Lucas had not paid the last six months’ premiums because of what he said were some severe but temporary financial difficulties. We had no choice but to cancel the policy and notified him of the cancellation ten days ago. Our home office in Eureka, at my earnest suggestion following Lucas’s tragic death, decided that it was good for the company to invalidate the cancellation and pay the death benefit. After all, Lucas had been paying on the policy for over fifteen years.”

Otis knew there had been no money to buy a Daisy air rifle or a Cushman or much of anything else special, but he had not been aware of any severe financial difficulties. There had been several good rains during the growing season, and all 112 acres of the wheat crop had come in healthy and on time. The price at the co-op grain elevator where his father worked as the manager was
geared to those in Kansas City and the Chicago commodities market, and they had stayed relatively high. So what was the problem?

Florence Halstead cried as she took the check for $12,500 from Mr. Pratt, and after he was gone, Otis asked her about the difficulties.