Things as They Are

ACCLAIM FOR
Things As They Are

KING CALLED ME LONG DISTANCE
from the city again last night. He said, “They’re warning me to stay clear of Putt ’N’ Fun Town, leave off playing the mini-golf.”

“King,” I said.

“I ain’t going to do it,” he said.

“Whatever you think is best, King,” I said.

“Just so you know what’s really going on here,” he declared and hung up.

King is my brother. He’s seven years older than me, turned seventy-eight last January. We were raised in Advance and both of us lived our whole lives here, until recent circumstances took King to the city.

Everybody in Advance knows King Walsh. For seventy years more heads were wagged in this town over King Walsh’s mistakes than any other baker’s dozen of ordinary men. But King got forgiven his little errors, people liked him all the better for making them, and it didn’t hurt either that brother had a smile could light up a coal bin. However, the difference between an old man’s mistakes and a young man’s is that the ones the old man makes he’s probably got to live with the rest of his life. King’s learning that now, living his big mistake, the one that’s trapped him in a basement suite in his son’s house there in the city.

Albert Walker met up with King and me that day in the beer parlour and talked us into going along with him as moral support to The Senior Silver Jets’ Wednesday afternoon Singles’ Dance. So moral support sat on tin chairs watching a couple dozen old widows dancing the foxtrot with each other and throwing us boys the hopeful come hither looks. I been a bachelor all my life, and like it that way, so I kept my eyes mostly wherever theirs weren’t.

Tell the truth she was a pretty lean stag line, consisting of just four old bucks – King, Albert Walker, me, and Rudy Schmidt, who was acting as master of ceremonies because he’d been a cattle auctioneer before he retired and so was accustomed to public speaking. Now Rudy is a professional when it comes to talking but even he can’t hold a candle to Albert Walker. King was catching the brunt of it, that endless rambling on about this and that and a hundred per cent of nothing. But all of a sudden, out of the blue, Albert says something of interest. “King, remember that night you danced every dance on one leg at Kinbrae School?”

King said he sure as hell did.

The summer of 1935 was what they were talking about, the summer King broke his ankle, the summer I was fifteen and King had me drive his car out to Kinbrae School on a soft, starry night because he couldn’t work the clutch with a cast on. My brother was twenty-two that summer, his hair red and full as a rooster’s comb, and him a one-legged dancing fool. That night in Kinbrae he danced with every woman that didn’t drive him off with a stick when he hopped up to her. Thirty-three answered the call – not many women ever refused King. His chums slung his arms over their shoulders and poured rye into him between tunes and the band agreed to play through the midnight lunch so King didn’t cool down, go stiff, and bind up. Come two in the morning there were still more than twenty ladies, some old enough to have been his mother, lined up for a second go around. “Death before dishonour,” King said and jolted through the entire mixed assortment. Last partner of the ball was Elsie Macintosh. The sun was standing
in the window and her anxious father in the door when the band collapsed from exhaustion and the curtain came down on the spectacle. King married Elsie two years later. I wonder how many times she wished she could have took that final dance back.