Grantville Gazette - Volume V (18 page)

"How's it going, Brother?" Joe Stull pulled up a chair next to Dennis' bed in Leahy edical Center.

"Not bad, under the circumstances. Looks like I'll make it. And I'll never have to worry about getting appendicitis any more, considering where the bullet went. The surgeon did a neat job, but says that my hip on that side will probably remember this in cold weather right to the end of my days."

"I came over between the visitation and the funeral to give them permission to operate. Everyone says that if Nichols is out of town, which he was, up in Jena, this Dr. Scultetus from Ulm is the surgeon to go with if a person needs to be cut and pasted. Pat agreed, and she should know since she works for the sanitary commission. But they wouldn't take her signature as next of kin, so she called me."

Dennis smiled beatifically. "She stayed all night. I don't think she slept. You just missed her. She went off to file divorce papers against Francis. She left in time to make sure that she'd be there when the office opens at eight this morning."

A little more seriously, he said, "Which means that she's decided that she would rather have me than heaven. I never doubted, you know, why she wouldn't marry me. Never thought that she was giving me excuses. She really did believe that if we married, God would send her off to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and all his angels, where there would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. I don't doubt that she still believes it. Not a bit."

Joe tipped the straight chair back on its hind legs. "It's going to be a shock for Noelle when she hears about it."

"Yeah. There's that. It's nice that Maurice Tito is keeping the court offices open on Saturday. Otherwise, she'd have had to wait 'till Monday."

Joe steepled the tips of his fingers together. "I think they must have put something in Grantville's water in 1957. Something along the lines of 'ExtraZip' or 'SuperCharge.' That year didn't just produce Aura Lee and Chad. I remember one day in the summer of 1974. Aura Lee and I went for burgers. We picked them up and she marched me over to a booth where some of her friends were sitting."

He grinned. "Nat Fritz, Martha Wright, Renee Warner. That bunch. The other little college-bound princesses. Two teachers and a guidance counselor, now. That's Natalie Bellamy now. Martha married Keith Trumble; Renee married Maurice Tito, the judge, which is how come this sprang to my mind all of a sudden."

"I don't know," Dennis answered. "It may just be that for some reason, that year, Grantville's 'best and brightest' didn't leave to find jobs somewhere else. The kids born in '57 were just barely old enough to have gotten settled with jobs they could hang onto when the slump hit in the middle of the nineteen-eighties. For the next few years, maybe only half of the kids who went away to college or into the service came back. Or stayed if they did come back. It was quite a brain drain. A person can only speculate what kind of a dynamo we would have dropped into Thuringia if we'd had a set of people like those from every year since 1950 or so. Plus, when you come to think about it, Nat and Renee went out and recruited. Brought Arnold and Maurice back to town with them."

Joe nodded. "Eloise Agnew, too, though she wasn't sitting there that afternoon. She was the same year in school. She married Douglas Curtis and he's the minister at the Church of Christ, now."

He grinned. "They started talking about what to do that evening. Aura Lee said that she was expected to show up at some kind of wholesome activity for teens at the Methodist church and her dad would pick her up at ten. I asked if they all wanted me to drop them off there. Renee said that wholesome Catholics weren't supposed to go to wholesome Methodist activities. Martha ditto for Church of Christ, but Nat was also headed for First Methodist, so I dropped the two of them off to play musical chairs and see a slide show about needy people in Africa and went to the drive-in with a couple of guys. Ingram Bledsoe and Chuck Rawls, in case you're curious, and we saw
Blazing Saddles
."

Dennis wondered idly why one particular day in the summer, thirty years in the past, would still be so clear in Joe's mind. Memory was a funny thing, sometimes.

"You know what Bernadette said after you and Pat went off in the ambulance?" Joe went on.

"Not having been there any more, no."

"She said, 'That doesn't make sense. Father O'Malley told Pat that if she got an annulment, she still couldn't marry Dennis because she'd committed adultery with him. But what an annulment does is say that there wasn't any marriage. So if she hadn't been married, she couldn't have committed adultery.' The last I saw her, after the funeral, she was headed off to St. Mary's to quiz the Jesuits."

"It would be a big relief to Pat if she hadn't committed adultery," Dennis said. "But I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around this one. I'm damned sure she was married to Francis Murphy. I was working in Clarksburg then. I took off work and sat by the phone the day she did it. Until she hadn't called and I knew she'd gone through with it. Drank myself into a stupor, even though I normally don't drink much. I came so close to taking myself down that the other guys called an ambulance and hauled me to the hospital to be pumped out."

"It's a bit esoteric for a Methodist, yeah. Let them worry about it."

"I never looked her up, you know," Dennis said. "Not even after I heard that she'd left Francis. I ran into her again by accident, coming around a corner by the old hotel in Grantville. She had Maggy, Pauly, and Patty with her. A few crows feet around her eyes; she'd put on about a pound a year, most of it in her hips, and tired—she looked so tired. We just looked at each other and I said, "Come with me."

"Nothing like the direct approach," Joe said.

"So we went over to Ma's and I asked her if she could watch the girls for a bit. She got up and said, 'I'm Mrs. Stull. I've got some M and Ms and we're going into the kitchen to learn how to make big cookies with smiley faces on them.' Pat and I went up to my old room. When we came back down, the cookies had been baked and eaten and Ma was teaching them to sing parts. Maggy on lead, and the other two, even little Patty, who could barely talk, coming in on, 'It was an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny yellow polka dot bikini.' They'd saved us each a cookie."

"Yeah," Joe said. "Ma deserved a better visitation than she got. There should have been more people there who remembered her. We should write Harlan over in Fulda and get him to send us his favorite 'Ma story.'"

"What's yours?" Dennis asked.

"Aura Lee's family is a little screwy, and that's the truth. Nothing wrong with Willie Ray. Ray and Marty and their kids are okay. But Vera's been high-strung all her life and she took it out on Debbie. It made Aura Lee a bit antsy about settling down with me, being afraid of all those dramatic confrontations. In '83, when the federal black lung office in Parkersburg got in touch with Ma and told her that Pa had died in Florida and she was entitled to widow's benefits, we came up to Grantville. I stayed at Ma's, of course, and Aura Lee out at her folks. Never anything to embarrass the Hudsons. Since she was an accountant, she spent all day Saturday helping Ma fill out all those forms and papers. Vera was just furious. Then on Monday—I'd taken a day of leave—we took Ma to Parkersburg to turn them in. Aura Lee's name was on the papers as the person who prepared the forms."

"I don't think I ever heard this," Dennis said.

"Ma could keep her mouth shut. The claims examiner in Parkersburg asked Aura Lee what she was. She gave them her job title and bureau. The woman said, 'No, I mean your relationship to Mrs. Stull.' The two of us just looked at one another and finally she said, 'Joe here is her youngest son and I . . . we . . .' I guess she couldn't think of any word that wouldn't sound awfully stark if she said it out loud. Ma said, 'For close to ten years, now, Miss. I trust her.' The bureaucrat wrote down, 'family friend.' When we got back to Charleston, that was when I moved into her apartment, for all practical purposes. Which was where things stayed stuck for the next four years, but it was progress."

"Yeah," Dennis said. "Ma deserved for us to make a scrapbook for the kids, at least. With her name on the front, 'Juliann Stull.' And the dates."

"What are you doing about telling Noelle?" Joe asked.

"Pat's going to write her a letter. Tony will send it down to Franconia in the government mail bag and it should catch up with her eventually. Do you know what Pat was telling me, just when the bullets started flying?"

"No. I was over by Ma's casket."

"That Noelle's thinking about being a nun."

"Now that downright sucks."

"That's kinda what I thought. Not that I have anything to say about it. Pat and I were together over a year that time. I shouldn't have left her, but it just hurt so damned much when she still wouldn't divorce Francis and marry me, after she got pregnant. I went and watched when Pat had her baptized over in Fairmont. Not sticking my oar in. I just sat on a pew way in the back of the church and watched. She's grown up to be a fine girl."

"Since you'll be marrying Pat, you probably ought to practice saying 'daughter' now. At least, if she's willing to claim you after all these years." Joe tipped his chair down again and got up. "I suppose that I ought to be getting over to the office."

"Maurice Tito's not the only one who keeps Saturday hours these days."

"There's a lot to be done. And you know what they say about the early bird catching the worm. These days, more often than not, it seems that I'm spending more time trying to dig up slimy worms than actually making progress on improving transportation."

"Well, you know that you can rely on us in Erfurt. Anything even the least bit funny looking that comes through procurement will get flagged for your and Tony's attention right away."

"Tony," Horace Bolender complained, "will you please quite humming that horrible song?"

"Tut, tut," Tony Adducci answered. "Country music covers all the emotions and actions to which human flesh is heir. Especially country oldies. 'If you've got the money, honey, I've got the time.' With a nice dose of narcissistic self-pity frequently, I have to admit. 'Honky Tonk Angel.' What do you have against 'The Green, Green Grass of Home'? Why do you object to "Long Black Veil'? How can it be that 'Ring of Fire,' of all possible selections, offends you on this fine summer morning?"

Bolender glared at him and went on down the hall toward his own office.

Tony continued his less than fully melodious greetings to a new day as he sorted through his in-box.

Country music did just about say it all. Although Ron Koch, the engineer out at the mine, maintained that no American country song ever written could quite equal the classical simplicity of the German:

Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen, 
Du, du, liegst mir im Sinn. 
Du, du, machst mir viel Schmerzen, 
Weisst nicht wie gut ich dir bin. 
You, you, rest within my heart;
You, you, rest within my senses.
You, you, cause me a lot of pain.
You don't know how good I am to you.

That particular verse, Koch insisted, grasped the whole essence of the heartbroken misery of a male faced with a female who did not appreciate him even though he thought she should. It comprised, Koch maintained, the essential Platonic Idea of a lament on this topic, without complications and specifications, requiring no particular setting, but being of universal and worldwide applicability. It could be translated into any other language with no changes required. He and Tony had addressed the matter over many a beer at the Thuringen Gardens.

Tony rather liked Koch. He mildly resented the fact that he had never come up with anything to match that song, though. Some day, one would occur to him.

He made the in-box last as long as possible. Then he resigned himself to the need to think about other things.

One of the few topics that country music failed to address was the intricacies of Catholic canon law. Tony couldn't think of a single song about that. Bernadette had really set the Jesuits in a tizzy last night. The conundrum she had set them was just the kind of moral theology puzzle they could debate endlessly.

The practical answer, however, appeared to be that since Larry Mazzare was now a cardinal, if not, apparently, a bishop, the precise status of Pat and Francis Murphy's marriage, from the viewpoint of the Catholic church, was going to have to wait for him to come back from Italy and think about it.

Tony sat down and looked out the window, wondering what Noelle was going to think about it.

Pat said she was going to write, but who knew how long it would take her to get her nerve up and put some actual words on paper.

It wouldn't be a good idea for Noelle to find out any of this by reading a copy of the
Grantville Times
that made it to Thuringia.

Plus, he was, after all, the girl's godfather. He had responsibilities.

He pulled out a piece of paper and started to try to think of words. Finally, he just told her exactly what Pat had said while she was sitting on the floor next to Dennis at Central Funeral Home. Sealed the letter with considerably more glue than usual. And hoped for the best when he took it down to the booth where the security guard sat and dropped it in the mail pouch.

"So," Carol Koch said, "you can see something of my dilemma. Then Aura Lee recommended that I talk to you. Natural enough, since I'm working with math and statistics and you're a math teacher. A lot more natural than if I go trekking off to talk to your father for no apparent reason."

They were in a corner of the teachers' lounge at the high school. Natalie Bellamy uncrossed her legs; then crossed them again. "I know that Arnold gets involved in this sort of stuff, to some extent. It's unavoidable, working for the Department of International Affairs."