The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell Page 0,50
hills.
A week went by. It was still too hot to work on stripping the wallpaper but I went into town and bought some scrapers so I’d be ready once the heat broke. When I came home the mail had just been delivered with a letter from Andy which was a rare enough event. Things were still fine at Fort Puke. His company had finished basic now and were undergoing advanced infantry training attacking Tiger Land learning what it was like to fight in Vietnam. He volunteered for lots of jobs he said. Potato peeling ditch digging mosquito control. He couldn’t stand it standing in ranks being asked for volunteers and no one raising his hand so he’d raise his. It just shot up he couldn’t help it. Their instructor was named Sergeant Cobb who was tough but fair and you wouldn’t want to get on his bad side but he had taken a fatherly interest in Andy so all in all things were fine. In their free time he was watching TV mostly so I didn’t have to worry about him getting sick in Diseaseville.
No sooner had I finished reading this than I heard a soft whisking noise on the screen like a kitten scratching to get in. August! She had a happy smile on her face and was dressed in canvas overalls that made it seem like she had been working pretty hard though I noticed she had embroidered the floppy bottoms and tied on little bells.
“Come on in!” I said.
I asked if she was hungry and she said no but when I put out a plate of brownies she gobbled them up pretty fast then asked if I had any Coke. Maybe they didn’t have enough food up there yet since growing season wasn’t over or maybe she was used to so much sugar in the suburbs she needed to be weaned from it gradually.
During her walk she had woven a necklace of black-eyed Susans which she hung around my neck. We sat on the porch and I listened while she talked. It was mostly about her home down in New Jersey and how much she hated it though she spoke very soft. Everybody always so competitive so obsessed with money and status going to cocktail parties and bragging about what cars they drove voting Republican building ticky-tacky houses not caring about anything except the stock market meanwhile living the most destructive least sustainable way of living ever invented. She rattled off her list then did something I thought was cute. She waved her hand toward the south and mouthed “Bye-bye” to it like a little girl.
I don’t have a girl of my own to tell stories to or hear stories from so maybe that’s what made her visits special. We never had those wars mothers and daughters go through when the mother wants the daughter to be like her and the daughter doesn’t want to do that so there’s war.
She said things were getting easier at the Shoe as they began forgetting the selfish every man for himself dog eat dog rat race world they had been brought up in. There was an aura of peace they could sense hovering right above them which was as real as the sunshine and the only way to let it descend was to create harmony among themselves and the only way to create harmony was to work and work digging the moat that was going to protect them from the outside world which was the term they gave to the independence they strove so hard to build except on Mondays which Rosen had decided were going to be devoted to meditation.
“Rosen, huh?” I grunted. “Sounds like he’s the big cheese up there. Where’s he hail from?”
“California. The desert part.”
“Yeah? Well, does he ever talk about himself being the Messiah?”
She laughed with that. She thought my questions were hysterical.
“He has a new name,” she told me. “We call him Granite now.”
“Granite? Hard granite stone?”
She nodded. “Yes, only harder.”
It was clear she admired him. He often hiked into Canada leading strangers who mostly kept their faces hidden and when he came back it was with more weed than they could possible smoke and this special kind of Canadian oatmeal everybody devoured. And there was good news now. Lilac her best friend the nicest girl the one everybody loved was pregnant and the baby could come at any time.
“Our baby,” August called it. Everybody in the Shoe that’s what they called it. Ours.