In God We Trust (29 page)

My mother, after the first shock, hissed:

“Don’t open your trap! Don’t say a word, either of you! Do you understand? Not a
WORD
!”

In came the Assessor, scanning our worn Oriental rug as he nodded curtly and began to put a price on our world.

“How old is the rug? How long have you had that umbrella stand made out of the hollowed foot of an elephant? How much did it cost? New, that is. I don’t have that bridge lamp on last year’s list. New, eh? How much is that Flexible Flyer over there worth?”

All over the house, room after room, closet after closet they went, my mother keeping up a running counterpoint:

“Oh, why that’s just an old thing. My sister was going to throw it out and I just thought I’d bring it home. Didn’t cost anything. We got that refrigerator at the Salvation Army. It burns out all the time and makes a funny noise. This is the first time in months that it’s stopped making that funny noise.”

“Sounds pretty good to me. Sounds good.”

“I can’t understand it. We can’t even sleep when it’s going. We’re thinking of giving it away. It’s not worth the four dollars we paid for it. What a gyp!”

“Sounds pretty good.”

He made a note on his clipboard, smiled thinly, and moved on. He never even bothered to remove his lumpy gray hat.

We had a prop radio that we showed the Assessor every time he came. Our real radio with the magnificent Gothic Cathedral cabinet was lurking under piles of old tires in the basement. We showed him an old battery set that Uncle Tom had had and that was surplus from the Civil War. It had received some of the very first messages that Marconi had tapped out, using a magnetized railroad spike and Edison jars. My mother extolled its virtues:

“It’s a sentimental friend of the family. But it’s our radio. It uses dry cells and has a propeller on the side that is wind-driven. Since the creek dried up, the battery doesn’t work. We get nothing but whistles. But my husband likes it.”

“Hmmmmm. That’s a genuine Crosley Bandbox. Beautiful carved cabinet there. Bird’s-eye oak. Looks hand-rubbed.”

“Look where the mice ate out the back here. See, I stick this Sears Roebuck catalog behind so nobody can see it.”

She banged the cabinet hollowly, hoping it would crack. Another enigmatic smile, and then the rug:

“Say, that’s not a bad-looking rug you have there. Oriental, isn’t it?”

“Now wait a minute. Look, here’s the place where the hole was burned, where Uncle Carl dropped his pipe and burnt the hole in there. Where the beer was spilled.”

She moved the rickety, moth-eaten overstuffed davenport back to show him the place that she tried to hide from the rest of the world.

“Oh well, they could fix that. A couple of dollars and they’ll reweave that like nothing. Oriental, isn’t it?”

He plucked at the fringe, fingering it appreciatively like a connoisseur of fine linens and tapestries or an Armenian rug dealer coming across a rare find. My mother’s panic rose.

“Say, that’s a nice picture up there. Look at that—a sailboat, isn’t it? That’s a lovely picture. It’s an original, isn’t it?”

My mother fended off this blow:

“Original my foot! Original Woolworth.”

On it went, my mother systematically degrading our lives by simply telling the truth. She invented nothing. Before the Assessor came, we always pretended that the holes in the rug didn’t exist and the picture wasn’t an original Woolworth; the refrigerator not a crummy piece of tin that soured milk and curdled cream. Here she was, laying it down—the truth. And I am hearing it; a kid. Who loved his home and the things in it.

“No, Ma! Ma, it’s our refrigerator! It has great ice cubes! And our great rug! I lay on it and follow the pattern with my eyes! It’s a beautiful rug! With gold fringe! Ma, it’s not a terrible rug!!”

Finally the Assessor closed his book.

“Well, that’s it. You’re not doing too bad.”

His feet dragged over our threadbare carpet, the worn linoleum, and out into the cold for another two years. The Assessor had come and gone.

A few hours later my father got the full report as he breezed in through the kitchen door, smelling of the outside and the office.

“What’s new?”

“The Assessor was here.”

“WHAT
!”

He stopped in his tracks, his face suddenly white.

“The Assessor was here.”

The yellow light bulb grew dimmer. The refrigerator sighed
deeply, going into action with a squeak of the pulley and thump of the compressor. The floor shook. Over the roar my father shouted:

“Who was it?”

“That tall thin man who lives in that brick house on the other side of the Schwartzes. Around the back, over the garage.”

“Oh, I’ve seen him around.”

He slowly removed his overcoat and plumped down in the one kitchen chair that was not broken somewhere, somehow.

“Did you get the radio in the coal bin before he got in?”

“Yep.”

“D’you think he saw it down there?”

“I don’t know. He looked in the coal bin.” There was a terrible fear that somehow somebody would get the impression that we lived like human beings.

“What’s for supper?”

“Meat loaf.”

Gradually the chill thawed. Finally it faded out completely as the months went by. Then, out of the blue, without so much as a murmur of thunder on the horizon, the hammer fell.

It was a crackling sunny clear-eyed Friday afternoon. Our mosquito swarm of kids slowly worked its way toward home, kicking, hollering, throwing stuff, looking for junk, drifting like rain through the alleys, over fences, under porches, down innumerable shortcuts; Schwartz, Flick, Alex, Junior Kissel, me, and a covey of lesser satellites.

At last we reached the block, ready to rush in to individual houses, grab some Graham crackers or fig newtons and out the back doors to begin whatever game was being played at that moment in time. Throwing rocks was an important way of getting home. Rocks were thrown at a regular established set of targets—Mrs. Schaeffer’s birdhouse, Pulaski’s Coca-Cola sign, and every telephone pole that got in our way. Our arms were sharp and rubbery and the rocks bounced and clanged. Every night the sparrows, robins, and wrens ducked and dodged, squawking raucously, urging us on, taunting, a barrel-rolling and
skittering through the ambient air amid a hail of whizzing clinkers.

Occasionally a lucky shot shattered an insulator high up amid the crisscrossing tangle of telephone wires and then a frenzied roar of flight up the alley, out of the danger zone. Particularly delectable were the posters that festooned fence posts, garages, and telephone poles. Fat-faced seekers of county office were constantly peppered with a steady barrage of anything that could be picked up and hurled.

“Watch me get old Corngrass. In the ear!”

ZZzzzziiiizzzzz … 
THWONK
!

“Wowie, what a lucky shot!”

“Lucky! That’s the third night in a row I got him. Lucky! Watch
THIS
!”

ZZZiiizzz
K-THONK BONK
!

Another blow for Anarchy was struck. Old Corngrass had run for mayor for as long as anyone could remember, each year using the same stolid, toad-like portrait; hair precisely parted with a thin, naked line down the middle of his skull, rimless glasses gleaming dully before beady, staring eyes. He never made it, maybe because he was so easy to hit with rocks.

Now we were on home turf.

“Watch me get that red one.”

ZZizzzz—the rock whistled past a new red cardboard poster, small, compact, with no picture.

ZZzzziiizzz

SSSSSiissss

Whooosh

Three projectiles simultaneously bracketed the target. All missed. We drifted idly toward the telephone pole, unaware of the disaster that was about to strike us all.

Flick arched an apple core toward the sign. It splatted on the post a few inches high. Schwartz slanted a bottle cap upward, curving nicely, trailing after a passing bluejay who yawked distainfully and continued on.

I don’t know who read it first. Maybe we all did; black print on red poster card.

That was all. It was enough. None of us had ever seen a sign like this before, but our instincts, deep and animal-like, told us that it was serious; a dangerous sign. Other dangerous signs showed up from time to time on front porches and screen doors.
QUARANTINED—DIPHTHERIA. SCARLET FEVER. SMALLPOX
. This w
AS
one of those, but different, somehow worse.

The neighborhood was unusually quiet, we noticed for the first time. Flick dropped a rock at his feet with a hollow clunk. Junior Kissel, without a word, turned and ran, cutting across the street, up the sidewalk, disappearing toward his house. Halfway down the block another identical sign gleamed in the bright sunshine. Schwartz, in an odd scared voice, broke the silence:

“What’s an auction?”

“I don’t know. Some kind of card game or something,” Flick answered.

“Maybe it’s like on the radio. That Lucky Strike auctioneer.…” Schwartz said.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

We broke up and headed for home, through the quiet hushed neighborhood. My mother was down in the basement, wringing out the wash in the gray, murky gloom, the concrete floor around her wet and flecked with patches of dank soapsuds. The old Thor washing machine muttered as it squeezed the clammy water from overalls, pillow cases, and housedresses. Her face was red from the steam and soap as she bent over the basket, twisting each garment for the final drops. Weak sunlight filtered in
through the narrow basement, ground-level windows fading out in the perpetual dark of the basement.

“Ma, what’s an auction?”

She straightened up, never missing a beat as she snaked a long, heavy bedsheet through the rubber rollers.

“What’s a what?”

“What’s an auction?”

“An auction?”

“Yeah, what’s an auction?”

“Why?”

She was talking in her half-hearing, hardly listening, working, answering-silly-questions
MOTHER
voice.

“Well, there’s a sign on the telephone pole that says they’re going to have an auction at Mr. Kissel’s house. The Sheriff is going to be there.”

The sheet squished on for what seemed like a long time. Suddenly she reached over quickly, snapping off the washer with a movement she had used for years. The basement was deathly still. She turned and looked right at me. Her voice sounded strange.

“What did you say? What was that? What are you talking about?”

“There’s a sign on the telephone post that says they’re having an auction at Mr. Kissel’s house. With the Sheriff. And it says.…” Now I was scared.

She rushed up the basement stairs, wiping her hands on her apron as she went.

“Don’t leave the house until I come back.”

She was gone, out the back door. I was alone in the kitchen now, looking out the window over at the Kissel’s house where she had gone. Another lady, tall, skinny Mrs. Anderson crossed the alley and disappeared into the house. No kids played in the yards. No radios were turned on as they always were. My kid brother came up through the back door into the kitchen where I stood on tiptoes, watching the Kissel house.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Mom said not to go out.”

He said nothing more. Finally, after what seemed like hours, she came into the kitchen and without saying a word began making supper. That night we ate quickly. Almost immediately after the dishes were washed we were sent to bed, and for the first time in a long while did not cause the usual protesting uproar.

Late that night I could hear my mother and father talking in low tones in the living room, through the closed door, until I fell asleep.

Somehow the sun always shines on Saturdays in Indiana. Outside the bedroom window a yelling crowd of spatsies, the generic Kid name for sparrows, argued, swore, made clattering love. Out in the kitchen water ran and pots banged.

At first when the full delicious impact swept over me that it was Saturday—no school today—blessed, fantastic Saturday and that this afternoon Flick and Junior and I would ride the range with Roy Rogers and Trigger at the Orpheum, I reached over in ecstasy, belting my brother in the ribs, ready for action. He groaned almost at the same time that I remembered something funny was going to happen today.

I got up and padded into the kitchen where breakfast was already on the table. The Old Man, dressed in his Saturday clothes, was halfway through his eggs. Drifting through the kitchen window from somewhere outside came the roar of a truck motor backing and shifting. My mother, over near the sink, looked out.

“They’re here.”

My father dropped his fork, circled the table, and peered from the other window. I stood on tiptoes.

At an angle, almost filling the whole of their sandy, weedy backyard stood a tall, gray official-looking truck, behind the Kissel’s house. Men in overalls moved in and out the back door, carrying boxes and barrels. Already piled high in the sunlight, warped, cracked, and stained with the chewing of the years, stood the Kissel furniture. The men struggled under loads of nondescript junk, back and forth, from the basement to the attic, from the garage to the kitchen.

The sheriff drove up in a black Ford with a white star on the door and got out. He didn’t look like a movie sheriff at all, being fat and wearing a long, grayish overcoat. He really looked more like a dentist than a sheriff. He had two men with him; one a tall, thin, red-faced man with eyes that popped, who began making a list in a notebook. The other set up a kind of platform behind the back porch. It folded, and looked as though it had been used. One of the workmen brought out a microphone and hooked up a leatherette-covered speaker on the ground near the truck. We watched from behind the geraniums.