Sway (14 page)

“Well hello, young man,” said Dad. “What can we do for you today?”

“Nothing,” said the boy, looking over the brown suitcase with a sulky frown on his face. “I don't want any old soap. I just wanted to see what all the commotion was about.”

“Do you have a job in this here battle?” said Dad.

“No, I mainly just stand over there and wait for my dad to die and come back to life.”

“Do you really play the drums?” I asked him.

“Whenever I can,” he said.

“Well, young man, want it or not, I do have something that would be perfect for you,” said Dad, rummaging through the collection and finding a green soap marked
TH
.

“Tommy Hubler was rumored to be the youngest member of the Union Army,” he explained. “A fine, brave drummer boy he was, alerting troops of their movement orders, sounding retreat in the midst of heavy enemy fire, and standing by ready to lay down the drum and help an injured man if necessary.”

“Um, no thanks,” said the boy. The puppy whimpered and squirmed.

“You sure? My assistant can hold your pup while you wash,” Dad said.

“You mean this stuff really works?” the boy whispered to me. Both he and Dad waited for my response. In place of an answer, I just did a little shrug-nod.

“Hold up,” Dad said, finding yet another soap, this one with just an
S
on it. “And speaking of that there pup, who could forget Stubby, possibly the bravest-ever soldier dog, who accompanied soldiers in seventeen battles during World War I, providing comfort, companionship, and the occasional biting of an enemy behind.”

“If you say so,” said the boy, handing me the puppy and squatting to wash his hands in the wagon. I knelt next to him to hold the puppy's front feet in the water while the boy put some Stubby suds on there. The pup wiggled so hard it sent bubbles splashing all over his little licky face.

“This feels kind of goofy,” said the boy.

“I know,” I mumbled.

“Which one's your dad?” I tried to change the subject. “I'll watch for him today.”

“The guy who used the Napoleon soap,” he said, taking the dog into his arms and backing away from the wagon with a shy, “Thanks.”

After the boy was gone, Dad turned his attention back to the crowd.

“We mustn't neglect the ladies here today,” he said. “For you all, we have a very special soap. A Mrs. Clara Barton, nicknamed ‘Angel of the Battlefield,' who tirelessly and tenderly nursed the Civil War wounded back to health.”

Three of the big-skirted women raised their hands in response, and the rest of the waiting gentlemen let the ladies cut in front of them.

“Not to worry,” said Dad. “It's a sizable sliver Clara left behind. More than enough washings to go around.”

A woman with a smear of mustard on her cheek was next up to the table.

“I don't do anything on the battlefield,” she said. “But I'm in charge of feeding all these folks, so maybe I could use a good hand-washing for more than one reason today.”

Dad smiled and said, “I know just what you need.”

He rummaged for a minute through the pile of loose slivers in the bottom of the case for an
A A
soap.

“Abigail Adams,” he said. “The very first woman to be called First Lady of the United States. In the late 1700's, she did such a splendid job of hosting visitors at the White House, she was nicknamed Mrs. President.”

As Dad handed out soaps one right after another, I found being so close to the collection totally mesmerizing, especially with Clara Barton, a famous rescuer's soap, in the mix. I remembered reading about her in school, how she was the founder of the American Red Cross, one of the groups that had sent Mom a letter of thanks for her work. I reached over to trace my finger in the letters of Clara Barton's sliver before it was handed off to the big-skirts, but I was stopped by Dad making an obnoxious game-show-buzzer noise.

“Remember…not till you're ready,” he said firmly, before getting back to the business of assigning soaps and directing people one at a time to the washing line.

The layers upon layers of slivers looked like little pastel pieces of bone, and their faint scents all mixed into one, making me wonder how such ancient soaps could still have smell left in them at all. After a while, I noticed a small tear in the silky lining in the lower left corner of the suitcase lid. Peeking from behind the tear was a paper corner, just a hint of something tucked behind the fabric.

“What's that paper sticking out there?” I asked Dad, between customers.

“Oh, none of your concern,” he replied in a singsongy way. I expected him to tuck the paper corner back under the fabric, but he didn't.

Instead, Dad got up to turn the wagon in a way that would allow more than one person to wash at once, and I turned my attention to that half-hidden piece of paper, walking my fingers up the edge of the suitcase and behind the rip in the lining. I slid the neatly folded paper out of there, careful not to make the tear any bigger. Then I shoved it up under my arm, excused myself to explore a bit, and wandered just beyond the ladies to a monument of stacked cannonballs. As the people awaiting their turns at the wagon stood still as chess pieces, I balanced on the topmost one of the slick stack of cold cannonballs and gently unfolded the frail document. It was soiled and faded and burned on one edge, and the words were written in nice cursive, like the roster of soldiers' names at the base of the monument. There was the smallest of melted soap slivers stuck to the bottom of the certificate with a piece of purple ribbon smashed under it, like it had been sealed by a king. The document read:

CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY

LET THE HOLDER OF THIS COLLECTION OF SOAPS REST

IN THE ASSURANCE THAT THE CONTENTS BEQUEATHED

HEREIN ARE NO LESS THAN ONE HUNDRED PERCENT AUTHENTIC,

THEIR POWER AND POTENTIAL

IMMEASURABLE.

The words shot such a fire through me, I near slid off my cannonball.
Authentic. Assurance. Potential. Immeasurable power.
It certainly was fancy enough language to be something handed down for generations. And the paper looked old and worn as the Declaration of Independence.

Across the field, as I watched uniformed men and frilly women, recognizers and appreciators of all things authentic, put their trust in our collection of soaps, I found myself squeezing that certificate so hard I put peanut brittle fingerprints on it. Then suddenly, it felt like someone had struck a match in a shed full of fireworks, each new thought its own whistling explosion of color. Who had written this certificate? And why had
my
family been chosen to receive these soaps? And then I wondered which soap I would choose for myself, and what it would feel like to wash with it. Would it send ghostly coldness all through my veins? Or maybe give a tingle up my arms, like an itty-bitty electrical zing. A
zingle
, perhaps. After all, even the Tommy Hubler boy had said it
felt
weird to wash with one. Maybe that's what he meant.

It was at that moment that I remembered the baby bird I'd seen nested in the letter Y on that sign back home. And then I imagined my own rubbery baby bird self moving out of the Y and into the O.

O me.

O my.

O wow.

Could Sway be
real
?

A
crowd of spectators was fast filling the bleachers on the opposite end of the field, so I crammed the certificate into my back pocket and galloped my way back to Dad. He was leading the last guy in line to take a quick wash with a Robert E. Lee soap in wagon water blackened by gunpowder.

“Where've you been?” Dad asked.

I suddenly felt bad for swiping the certificate, sure that he'd be mad I'd put my sticky fingerprints all over it.

“At the monument,” I said.

“Doing what?”

“Counting cannonballs.”

He gave me a look like,
Well, how many are there?

“And um, I think there are a hundred forty-five.” No clue if I was even close, but I was relieved that the Robert E. Lee guy didn't care to correct me. I pulled up a folding chair and took a look at the soaps piled in the bottom of the case. Now that I'd seen that certificate, the slivers took on a whole new radiance.

“Who all else you got in there?” I said.

“Tons. Have a look.”

I saw a creamy-white sliver marked
I N
sitting right on top.

“Who's that?”

“Sir Isaac Newton. The man who discovered gravity.”

“And what about that
F M
one?”

“Ferdinand Magellan, the first guy to sail all the way around the earth.”

“And that?” I pointed to a blue
L T
.

Dad smiled. “That one might not be of much use to us here today, I'm afraid,” he said. “That's Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer famous for being a pacifist. That means he believed in solving conflicts without the use of violence.”

Dad tumbled the soaps around gently to refresh my view. When he did, he uncovered a soap that so stood out, it was like it had a little glow around it.

“That
T N
one right there,” I said. “Is that a Toodi Nordenhauer?”

Dad picked up the soap to have a closer look, and I feared for a moment he might squish it in his fist.

“Sorry, Cass,” he said, with a shake of his head. “But no. This is Thomas Newcomen, inventor of the steam engine.”

“Oh…well then, do you have any Toodi soap?” I said, knowing full well I should drop the subject. Dad's reddening face suddenly made him seem like he might become the human version of a steam engine. He squeezed the slickified
T N
soap with a
fwit
, right across the table.

“No, Cass, I'm afraid we don't,” he said, wiping the Thomas Newcomen residue on his pant legs. “Surely there must be someone else you admire in this big world of ours.”

The crowd of battle spectators grew larger and louder in the bleachers.

“But how do you even know who's what?” I asked.

“Say again?”

“How do you know what the initials stand for?”

“Here's how,” he said, finding the tear in the lining of the suitcase and sliding his whole hand behind it, making a few of the slivers almost jiggle off their tacks.

Yeeks, I thought. He's looking for the certificate. But then he pulled out a second folded document that looked to be just as old and crusty and official as the other one had. Dad unfolded it and handed it to me. This one was larger than the certificate, but the cursive written on it was so very tiny, and the handwriting unlike any I'd ever seen. It was an alphabetical list of names, hundreds of them, it seemed, each with its corresponding soap initials next to it. But before I could even read beyond Abigail Adams, I was startled by the shrill blast of a bugle from the far corner of the clearing. As it played a rousing song, the men stood stiff in rows. All the ladies rose to their feet, their shoes hidden by billows of fabric. Dad grabbed the list from me, and with a fold-fold-fold-tuck, it was gone.

“I see Tommy Hubler has masterfully commanded everyone's attention,” said Dad, pointing across the field.

And sure enough, the young drummer boy stood straight and proud, a perfectly solemn call-to-battle rhythm coming from a drum he'd fashioned from a coffee can. Even the puppy stood still at his feet.

Soon after, the people in uniform took their posts. After the first chilling shot was fired, Dad and I spent the rest of the day sitting on a quilt at the edge of the battlefield, watching men who looked like living monuments charge at each other with swords and shoot one another with invisible bullets from smoky pistols. Throughout the skirmish, I paid special attention to the ones who had washed with our soaps. Stonewall Jackson led the men in gray. Ulysses S. Grant led the men in blue. Each one of them playing his part in such a powerfully real manner, it gave me a fearful stirring inside, as if I'd stepped right inside that schoolbook and was a part of history myself. Like I'd better choose a side quick and hope hard that my side was winning.

The woman who washed with Abigail Adams sent one Clara Barton after another into the field loaded with supplies, be it water, food, or blankets, for every need out there. More than once, a Clara would drag a collapsed man twice her size out of the line of fire. And all the while, Tommy Hubler played on. At one point, I even saw little Stubby bravely bound across the grass and bite the enemy on the ankle, right before the guy who used the John Wayne soap reared his horse up on two legs at the edge of the battlefield and told his men,
“Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway!”

I felt a fresh twinge of sadness for each and every man who crumpled in a heap on the battlefield, and for each woman who rushed to a wounded soldier's side. As more and more men lay across each other in the clearing, the sadnesses built up so that I could hardly stand to look. By the time the battle ended with a different, sorrowful bugle sound, there wasn't a dry eye among the onlookers. When all was quiet and still, Abigail Adams passed me a tissue and a tuna salad sandwich, and Dad wiped his nose on a napkin.

“Amazing, isn't it?” he said. “How something so pretend can feel so real?”

“Amen to that,” Abigail said, with a sniff.

And I guess I must have totally agreed with them, considering the immense relief I felt that the fighting was over. Once the final call of the drum sounded and all the dead had stood and dusted themselves off, I watched the participants mill about and shake hands. Several folks broke away to come thank us as we packed up our things. Dad was locking up the old brown suitcase, and I was kicking our table legs flat, when Napoleon Bonaparte stuffed his hand into the breast pocket of his gray coat and pulled out an old coin.

“It's a genuine relic, worth at least twenty bucks,” he said. “A token of my appreciation for the inspiration today, Mr. McClean.”

“Thank you.” Dad looked pleased and more than a little surprised. In fact, he had a total
Well, whadya know
look about him.

“The suds will rise again!” he hollered out, and the folks around us chuckled.

Then the spectators made their way toward us, spilling their compliments.

“Most passionate reenactment ever. Stirring beyond words!” they said. And I could have sworn I heard Tommy Hubler call it
awes
, while Napoleon gave him a good hair-mussing.

“Land sakes, what a success,” said a purple-skirted Clara, her bun unravelings all stuck to the sides of her face. As a dozen civilians collected at the ladies' table to enlist in the next reenactment, she said to me, “Darlin', will you and your daddy be back here again?”

She stretched out her words slow and sweet, just like my mom.

“No, ma'am. I'm not sure where we're going.”

Purple Clara's skirt made a
ding-ding
sound.

“Pardon me,” she said, digging a cell phone from a side pocket. “That's my daughter texting me from the beach.”

Just the mention of the word
beach
made me feel warm inside.

“From Florida?” I said.

“Nope,” she said. “Gulfport, Mississippi. I guess I should tell her everyone made it out alive today, huh?” She laughed, thumbing out her message super fast.

“I'm pretty sure Miss Barton never texted LUV YA to anyone,” a green-skirted Clara teased, yanking on Purple's apron strings.

“Excuse me,” I said, looking over my shoulder to make sure Dad was still packing. “Do you all know how I could add more minutes to a phone? Ours ran out.”

“Oh, it's easy,” Green Clara said. “Just get your daddy to buy you one of those refill cards. They got 'em at all the quick marts.”

“They got what at the quick mart?” Dad asked, sidling up next to us.

“Nothing. Just beef jerky,” I said, and more than one lady gave me a funny look. The mention of beef jerky put a hungry twinkle in Dad's eye and a tiny twinge of liar's guilt in my tummy. He gave the ladies one last salute before joining me for the trek back through the woods.

“Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees!”
a soldier shouted to the crowd.

“They say those were Stonewall Jackson's last words,” Dad said as we walked with some of the wounded back through the thicket toward The Roast. “Thankfully, these soaps only give people the good stuff.”

“So how do you know so much about all those people the soaps belonged to?” I asked.

“Six words,” said Dad. “En sigh clo pee dee uh. I've been doing me some studying.”

I helped him nudge the back end of the wagon over root after root. With each step stirring up the curiosity inside me, I decided there was no sense in holding back when it came to this thing called Sway. I wanted to know more about that stuff, and right then.

“Dad, what does
bequeathed
mean?” I said.

He grinned. “You found the certificate.”

“Yeah, it's in my pocket. I accidentally put some smudges on it.”

“Now, don't you go and mess that thing up too much,” he said. “That has a lot more historical significance than a SMART certificate.

“In fact,” he said, reaching out for the paper, “you better let me hang on to that.”

Dad and I tilted the wagon to let the last of the war drippings out, and climbed inside The Roast.

“I heard that freezing cold is a good way of preserving important documents,” he said, opening the fridge and sliding the folded certificate onto the ice tray shelf.

For someone to do something strange as that, I knew the certificate must be the real deal.

“So what's M. B. stand for?” I asked him.

“That question
uh-gane
?” he said.

The last time I'd heard him pronounce
again
all fancy like that was when he beat me, Syd, and Uncle Clay by fifty points in Scrabble by spelling the word RESCUERS. “Would you look at that? I used all seven letters
uh-gane
,” he'd said, all proud.

McClean looked to the ceiling in thought. “Hmmm…perhaps the M. B. stands for
Magic Bubbles
.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

That night, the smell of gunpowder and hot dogs breezed in through our open sunroof as I noodled in my book. A whole page of fiery swirls being shot from a cannon seemed right for the way I felt. Outside, a few of the sort-of soldiers lingered around a portable grill, telling and retelling the events of the day and how there'd been “new life breathed into the battle,” which seemed to me like such an odd thing to say. It wasn't long before their talk and Dad's snoring became just background noise to the thoughts hovering between me and the top of The Roast. I still wasn't certain why people would want to relive something as ugly as war again and again. It seemed like the worst kind of permanent to me. Unless, of course, it was just a permanent reminder of how good it feels for a battle to be over.

As Dad made grumbly sleep sounds on the other side of the curtain, I wondered if he had ever really considered what it means to have a suitcase full of immeasurable power. I mean, if Sway was real, then who knew? Maybe it could bring our family back together somehow. Maybe put an end to our own battle.

After a while, the sound of Tommy Hubler's
rata-tattats
lulled my wonderings out the roof. I made a list in my head of the days that I would want to reenact if I could. All but one of Mom's homecomings, of course. The day Syd and I caught a chipmunk in the storm cellar. And this day, maybe.

With that thought lingering, I tiptoed into the bathroom, squeezed a blub of toothpaste onto my brush, and whispered just one word to the mirror.

Sway.

Saying it out loud was like recognizing my own face for the first time in a week, like the twinkly-eyed arrival of a million possibilities.