The Cat Who Went Up the Creek

chapter twelve

Whiskers tickling the nose and a soft paw patting the eyelid could do it every time—quickly, quietly, efficiently. Qwilleran awoke with a start on Tuesday morning, as two furry bodies leaped from his bunk and headed for the kitchen. Despite the rude awakening he was in a good mood—still elated after Monday’s successes, still sharing the excitement of two young photographers about to publish their first book. He remembered his own first book, City of Brotherly Crime. It was completely forgotten now, and he was lucky to have salvaged a single copy, thanks to the late Eddington Smith.

It occurred to him momentarily that Doyle’s photos might not compare favorably with Bushy’s superb landscapes. That was a chance they were taking. An owl is an owl is an owl; there is always something noble about an eight-point buck and something comic about a skunk. Such thoughts were interrupted by a call from the attorney.

Barter said, “I’ve lined up the K Fund boys in Chicago, but the appointment will have to be Thursday, not Wednesday.”

“That’s all right. It will give Doyle an extra day to prepare his samples.”

“Will you write a preface to the book, Qwill?”

“By all means. And I’ll volunteer to write the cutlines.” Whatever Doyle’s wildlife shots lacked in originality, a skillful cutline could cover up with words.

He took his typewriter to the screened porch to work on his Tuesday column, and Koko was sitting alongside the machine, observing the operation—until a sudden sound or scent made his head jerk to the south and his whiskers bristle: Trespasser approaching!

It was Wendy, carrying a white bakery box. “Come in,” Qwilleran called to her. “What are you carrying so carefully? Koko thought it was a bomb.”

She said, “Doyle went to the art center, and Hannah and I drove to Fishport for some of those sweet rolls you like. You can keep them in the freezer—just a little thank-you for making things happen.” Her eyes were shining, and she bubbled with enthusiasm. “You know, Qwill, I’ve been so worried about Doyle that I haven’t been able to work on my family history, but suddenly I feel inspired again.”

“You never told me what inspired you in the first place. You said it was a dramatic incident.” Qwilleran sensed fodder for the ever-hungry space on page two. “I’d like to tape it.”

The tape recorder was set up on the snack table, and the following interview was later transcribed:

What prompted you to write a romantic family history instead of a genealogical chart?

I couldn’t see myself trekking to county courthouses around the country and searching for births and deaths and marriages. But I loved the stories my great-aunt told about our family, going back to about 1800. When she died, she left a trunkful of old personal correspondence that none of the cousins wanted, so my mother took it and stashed it away in the attic.

Then one day my husband and I were driving through the Ohio countryside, and we came to an intersection where a farm was being cleared for a strip mall. The sign said there would be a full-service gas station, two fast food places, a laundromat and a video store. The outbuildings were already knocked down, and they were working on the farmhouse itself—a large, plain two-story colonial. The front door had been removed, and the sash had disappeared from the windows. It had a ghostly look. But something caused me to shout “Stop! Stop!” I wasn’t yelling at the wreckers; I was telling my husband to stop the car.

We parked on the shoulder, and I saw a heartrending sight. A dump truck was backed up to the end of the building, and another was standing by. They had put a chute in an upstairs window and were throwing personal belongings into the dump truck: clothing, hats, shoes, underwear, stockings, cosmetics, hair brushes, framed photos, books, towels, bedding, lamps, a small radio, and then . . . a cardboard hatbox! Its cover fell off, and hundreds of letters flew out. The breeze scattered them all over the muddy lot.

I’d been controlling my horror and tears, but I broke down when I saw those letters in the mud. Doyle thought I was crazy. I didn’t know who had lived there, worn those clothes, read those books, saved those letters, but I cried my eyes out!

That’s when I took over my great-aunt’s trunkful of correspondence. I’m reading and cataloguing every one: date, names and addresses of senders and recipients, and type of content.

Organizing all this material into a cohesive history sounds like a huge undertaking.

It’s a challenge. First I’m absorbing all the events and emotions. Then I’ll decide whether to make it the story of a real family . . . or fictionalize it.

But first . . . I’m overwhelmed with the joys and sorrows, successes and failures, pioneer struggles to make a life, and crushing disasters. Those people even found humor in everyday life: an uncle being chased by a bull; a cousin marooned in a tree all night; an aunt ruining the stew when the preacher was coming to dinner.

Do you find the handwriting legible?

More so than my own! Penmanship was important in those days. They dipped a pen in ink and wrote slowly and carefully. Also, letters were formal and sometimes poetic.

When I get home, I’ll photocopy a couple of letters, Qwill, and send them to you.

After the tape recorder had been turned off, and Wendy had been complimented on a well-told tale, she said, “I phoned my mother in Cleveland last night while Doyle was at the art center. She knows about my compulsion to worry, and she approved your strategy to divert Doyle’s attention from forays into the woods. But when he returns from Chicago—then what? She suggested that we leave here this weekend and spend a few days at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island—a kind of second honeymoon, and a kind of second wedding present from her and Dad.”

“A splendid idea,” Qwilleran said, “although we’ll miss you both.”

alt="[image]"/>He took his Tuesday copy to the inn to be faxed before the noon deadline, and Lori gave him another picture postcard. It was another view of Sturbridge Village.

Dear Qwill—Love this place. Bought lots of things to ship home. Mona having reaction to allergy medication. If she flies home, I’ll turn in our rental car and travel with Walter.

Love from Polly

Interesting development, he thought. Not once had she said, “Wish you were here.”

“Everything okay?” Lori asked.

“Everything’s fine.”

“We’re losing the Underhills.”

“Too bad. Nice couple.”

“Why can’t we have more Underhills and fewer Truffles?”

In the foyer, a new exhibit was being set up in the display case. Susan Exbridge, the antiques dealer, was officiating. It was an assortment of wood carvings, bowls, metal sculptures of animals and what looked like instruments of torture. A sign in the case described it as THE NUTCRACKER INN’S COLLECTION OF NUTCRACKERS.

“Qwill darling!” Susan exclaimed in her histrionic manner. “How do you like it?”

“They must have had a lot of nuts in those days.”

“Nuts were a staple food of early American settlers,” she said.

“I thought they just bashed them between a rock and a hard place.”

“In the late eighteenth century the ritualistic ending to a meal was nuts, and artists and inventors vied to design clever nutcrackers . . . But I can’t talk now. Phone me at the shop, darling!”

She left, and Cathy Hooper stepped up. “Don’t forget the preview of the reenactment tonight, Mr. Qwilleran. Eight o’clock.”

“I’ve already reserved a booth, Cathy, but thanks for the reminder.”

Qwilleran had asked Riker, “Will you and your lovely wife be my guests at a preview of the Saturday Night Brawl?”

And Arch countered, “Will you and your voracious appetite be our guests beforehand?”

No one ever declined a dinner invitation from the food editor.

The Rikers spent summers in a little yellow beach house atop a sand dune overlooking the lake. It was only a thirty-minute commute to the office, but the psychological distance equaled the hundred miles of lake they viewed from their deck.

They were sitting there with apéritifs when Qwilleran arrived, asking, “What happened to the Dunfield house?”

The casual redwood next door had been replaced by a crisp cube of white stucco and plate glass.

Riker explained, “The widow couldn’t sell it or rent it, because of the rumor that it was haunted. So she tore it down and sold the land. Vacant lake frontage is worth more than the same property with an old house on it. What do you think of the new one? Looks like an ice cube. The dune dwellers haven’t decided whether it makes us look like a slum—or we make it look ridiculous.”

“Who lives there?” Qwilleran was sure he knew the answer.

Mildred said, “A woman from Down Below. I went over to welcome her to the neighborhood, but really to satisfy my curiosity, and she was as friendly as a cold fish. All she could do was complain—about the noise of the surf and the seagulls, about people walking on the beach and staring at her house and even taking snapshots of it, about dead fish washing up. Just to be devilish, I told her not to be alarmed by green lights flashing over the lake at night; they’re only UFOs.”

Qwilleran said, “She sounds like the charmer who was staying at the Nutcracker Inn. Keep Toulouse indoors. She hates cats.”

Toulouse was lounging on the railing of the deck with the assurance of a cat who has adopted a food editor. Mildred gave him a morsel of crabmeat as she passed a plate of canapés. “Is it true,” she asked, “that household pets are going to be the theme of your next limerick contest?”

“I think so. Rhymes about pets can be fun to write—whimsical, exaggerated, nonsensical. Give me another of those crabmeat things, and I’ll show you what I mean.”

In the time it took to eat a canapé, Qwilleran produced the following: “A black-and-white stray named Toulouse / found a home in the county of Moose. / He lives on ice cream / and chicken supreme / and crabmeat and paté of goose.”

“Hit the nail on the head,” Arch said.

Dinner was served al fresco, starting with cold purée of zucchini garnished with fresh blueberries.

Arch said, “Millie throws a handful of blueberries into everything.”

“They’re good for you,” she said.

Then individual beef potpies were served, and Arch remarked, “Do you realize that Millie is descended from a lumber camp cook?”

“My great-grandfather,” she said proudly. “The loggers lived on beans and salt pork, hardtack, boiled turnips, and tea boiled with molasses.”

“What about flapjacks? I thought they ate stacks of twelve, big as a dinner plate,” Qwilleran said.

Arch said, “That sounds like the figment of a Hollywood script writer’s imagination.”

Because there was no time for a formal dessert, Mildred served coffee and a confection called a Black Walnut Bombshell. They were balls an inch in diameter: buttery, nutty, not too sweet, and tasting faintly of chocolate. She packed some for her guest to take home.

“By the way,” Qwilleran said, “did I tell you I’m invited to be guest-of-honor at an MCCC luncheon?”

“What happened?” Arch said wryly. “Did those academic types suddenly find out we have a writer who doesn’t do double negatives and dangling adverbs?”

There had been a lack of rapport between the college and the media. Most of the faculty were from Down Below, and many of them commuted.

Qwilleran explained the breakthrough: “I was interviewing Dr. and Mrs. Abernethy, and she seems to have some connection with MCCC. She invited me to the luncheon. There’ll be a speaker from Down Below, but they’ll introduce me and I’ll be expected to say something trenchant in twenty-five words or less.”

“Write a limerick,” Mildred suggested.

He said, “Do you know that last year’s winner in the limerick contest now hangs in the lobby of the Hotel Booze—enlarged and framed? ‘There was a young lady in Brrr / who always went swimming in fur. / One day, on a dare, / she swam in the bare / and that was the end of HER.’ ”

They rode to the Hotel Booze in separate vehicles, so that Qwilleran could search for column material after the performance. The route lay along the lakeshore to the town of Brrr (as in “cold”).

The Black Bear Café occupied half the main floor and was the scene of the reenactment. Qwilleran and his guests were ushered to one of the booths lining three walls. On the other long wall was a bar with twenty stools, and in the center of the room were chairs still upended on tables after the last floor sweeping.

Beverages were being served until eight o’clock, and hotelkeeper Gary Pratt made the rounds of the booths, welcoming the spectators and reminding them to look at the programs on their tables. With his shambling gait and shaggy black beard and hair, he looked as ursine as the eight-foot mounted bear at the entrance.

The programs credited Roger MacGillivray, historian and coach; Carol and Larry Lanspeak, directors; Thornton Haggis, stage manager, who also played the role of “Whitey.”

Principals were Whitey, the saloonkeeper; Jake, his helper; Mrs. Watts and Lucy, barmaids; and George, the most-favored customer. Then there were lumberjacks, just in from the backwoods camps; the elite river-drivers from French Canada; sawyers from the mills at the river’s mouth; dance hall girls; and sailors from the schooners in the harbor.

Mildred, a native of the area, knew them all. “Lucy” was the daughter of her hairdresser; “Jake” taught math at the high school and coached the wrestling team; “Stinko” worked at Toodles’ supermarket; “George” was an insurance agent.

At eight o’clock the lights blinked for attention, and then blacked out, leaving only the vigil candles in the booths. The audience was silent, but a commotion could be heard beyond the entrance doors at the far right end of the bar. At the opposite end a double door opened and in came Whitey with his bar apron tied around his middle and with his shock of white hair looking like a torch in the grubby saloon. His helper, Jake, followed—a mountain of a man in a plaid flannel shirt. The two barmaids, one middle-aged and one young, wore long gray granny dresses with small white collars and white ruffled caps.

Jake went to work, setting up the chairs around the tables, while the barmaids wiped the tabletops. Whitey started pouring stage whiskey (cold tea) from whiskey bottles into shot glasses.

There were impatient thumps on the entrance door and shouts of “Open up!” Whitey consulted a large gold watch on a long chain and gave a nod to his helper. After unlocking the doors, Jake barred the entrance with his huge arms and admitted the thirsty horde in a thin trickle while bellowing, “No corks! No corks!”

He referred to the caulks, or steel pins, that could be attached to boots for gripping logs. Indoors, they damaged floors. In a violent fight, they damaged flesh.

In they came! Husky lumberjacks in beards and pigtails and burly backwoods clothing . . . Sailors of a taut, wiry build, wearing striped jerseys, tight pants, and hats with brims turned up all around. They yelled with the exuberance of youth:

“Whitey, y’ol’ galoot! Ain’t you dead yet?”

“Pour the red-eye, Whitey! I gotta thirst that’d drain a swamp!”

“Where’s George? He owes me a drink!”

“Ain’t George here yet?”

The loggers dropped into chairs around the tables and got out the cards and dice. The sailors kept their distance from this rough crowd and lined up at the bar. Also at the bar were three of the elite river-drivers in red caps and red sashes, just arrived from Quebec to ride the logs downstream like daredevils. A few dance hall girls, swishing their short skirts and twitching their bare shoulders, were especially interested in the French-Canadians.

The barmaids were bustling about the tables when young Lucy shrieked, “He pinched me!”

“Slap his face!” Mrs. Watts shouted, but before Lucy could summon the nerve, big Jake was on the spot. He raised the culprit by the collar, glared menacingly in his face, then dropped him back into his seat.

“Yahoo!” the other loggers yelled. In Whitey’s saloon it was all right to flirt with the dance hall girls but not with the hired help.

Whitey signaled to three sailors, and they put their heads together and sang sea shanties in three-part harmony. “Blow the man down, bullies, blow the man down,” and then the rollicking “What do you do with a drunken sailor early in the morning?”

Meanwhile the card players were gambling noisily for pennies; the crap-shooters were yelling incantations to the dice; the bawdy joke tellers were putting their heads together and then exploding in obscene laughter.

Next, three girls perched on barstools, crossed their knees and sang “She’s only a bird in a gilded cage,” while the patrons yelled, “Ain’t the one in the middle a dinger! Chip chip chip!”

One quiet logger who was not a part of the raucous group tried to join one of the groups around the tables. He was shooed away, and someone shouted, “Vamoose, Stinko.” Wandering over to the bar, he was rebuffed again, and one of the river-drivers barked, “Casse-toi, Bouc Puant!” Whitey sent him to sit at the end of the bar and told Lucy to take him a drink. Sitting there alone, Stinko pulled a mouth-organ from his pocket and entertained himself with simple tunes.

It was a lively Saturday night at the Hotel Booze. Two lumberjacks sang several verses about “the frozen logger who stirred his coffee with his thumb.” Two sailors walked around the room on their hands, and one of them did cartwheels the length of the bar top, while barflies yelped and grabbed their drinks. “How about pourin’ some more eagle-sweat, Whitey?”

At the card table, tempers were flaring. “You cheatin’ hell-pup!” Fists started to swing. Immediately Jake was on the scene, collaring the two rowdies, one in each hand and giving them the bum’s rush out the side door, leading to the alley. He returned brushing the dust off his hands, and Whitey signaled to the trio of sailors, who sang, “Michael, row the boat ashore, hallelujah!” Quietly the evicted pair sneaked back into the saloon, one of them holding a red-stained rag to his nose and acting as a crutch for the other, who was limping.

“Whitey!” someone shouted. “Why ain’t George here? Has he gone to get his teeth fixed?”

“George won’t be comin’ here any more,” said the saloonkeeper. “He got in a fight Thursday night and was sluiced.”

“Sluiced! Holy Mackinaw! Where’ve they got ’im?”

“In Pete’s funeral parlor next door. Can’t bury him till Monday. They’ve got him on ice. Pete built him a pine box, but George didn’t have money for a headstone, so we’re taking up a collection.” Whitey put a tin cup on the bar and rattled the coins in it. One by one the mourners filed past and dropped a few pennies in the cup.

Then a lumberjack yelled, “Let’s go and get ’im! Let’s bring ol’ George back for one last drink together!”

“Yahoo!” Six volunteers bolted out the side door, while Whitey and the barmaids poured and served, and the customers cheered and stamped their boots.

Soon there was kicking at the alley entrance, and Jake opened the double doors to admit the pallbearers with a six-foot pine box. The roomful of rowdies was strangely silent.

The pallbearers shouted, “Move three stools away! . . . Gotta prop ’im up! . . . Lean the box against the bar! . . . Whitey, got a crowbar? . . . Hang onto the box. . . . Keep it upright!”

With the wrenching sound of boards and nails, the lid of the coffin came off, and the audience gasped. There was George—stiff, chalk-faced, still in his bloody clothing.

Two gunshots shattered the breathless quiet! And the lights went out.

The room was in darkness only long enough for the reenactors—including the white-faced George—to line up, facing the audience, who responded with whoops, cheers, applause, whistles and yahoos.

The Rikers had to leave, but Qwilleran and most of the others attending the preview mingled with the players and congratulated them.

Whitey explained, “This is a reenactment of a true incident that took place right here in the Hotel Booze. His name wasn’t George. We don’t know what his name was or which of the headstones in the old loggers’ cemetery is his. My great-grandfather was a stonecutter, and the story has been handed down in our family.”

Qwilleran singled out Stinko for congratulations and questions. “Whose idea was it to have a character with a B.O. problem?”

“It was Roger’s idea,” was the answer, “but I volunteered. It gave me a chance to do a little character acting and play my harmonica. They say the stench in lumber camps was horrendous: Forty men sleeping in one big shanty, drying their snow-soaked socks around a potbellied stove, with no facilities for washing up. Phooey!”

Qwilleran handed out compliments: To Jake for his strong-arm act; to the river-driver for his French accent; to the girls for their provocative maneuvers. He learned that the singing sailors came from the chorus of Pirates of Penzance, and the acrobats were high school gymnasts.

Jake said to him, “Have you heard anything about a movie being made in Moose County—about the logging era?”

“Not a word! Where did you hear it?” As a journalist Qwilleran hated being in the dark—about anything.

“Well, I’m working at my father’s gas station this summer, and a guy with an out-of-state license said he was an advance man, lining up muscle-men as extras in a lumberjack film. He told me to keep it under my hat because another film producer had the same idea, and they wanted to beat the competition.”

“Hollywood epic or independent documentary?”

“He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask, because I wasn’t interested. I have this job with my dad and a commitment to the reenactors, plus I’m gonna be a father in August! First time!”

“Congratulations!”

“Thanks. It’s exciting, all right! And terrifying, in a way.” Jake grinned sheepishly.

Qwilleran said, “The producers won’t have trouble finding their extras. There are more Paul Bunyans per acre in Moose County than in any other place I’ve known!”

“My dad says we’re descended from Vikings. He tells some good stories.”

Qwilleran drove home in good spirits. Good show! Good dinner! And a few leads for the “Qwill Pen” column and Short & Tall Tales.

The Siamese were waiting with loud vocal complaints and irritably jerking tails that seemed to say, You’re late! . . . Where’ve you been? . . . Where’s our stuff?

“You missed a good show tonight,” Qwilleran told them as he prepared their bedtime treat. He himself had a cup of coffee and a black walnut bombshell from the supply Mildred had given him. Polly would disapprove; too many calories. Where was Polly tonight? He wondered.

He had another bombshell.