Rhizomania, Part 1

Doran’s new mulehide boots looked handsome, even as the leather was dusted with settling particles of Nebraska silt.  As he climbed the clay path leading away from Shorty’s river-stone house, Doran looked down at his feet now and then.  The brown mulehide leather over the insteps, stitched rough side out, contrasted with the smooth leather of the stovepipe tops.  The squared-off toes, the mitred ends of the pull straps, and the leaf-pattern stitching were all good to look at.  Stiff as they were, the new brown boots felt good, too.  Shorty had beveled the edges of the inner strip that served as a back stay, so there was no rubbing at the backs of Doran’s heels.  Shorty disapproved of men wearing “stockin’s” and since Doran had come to the homestead, his feet had come to know smooth boot leather very well.

Now, as he climbed the path, he could tell from the firm flex of the insoles that Shorty had flattened a pair of forty-penny nails and inserted one in the left boot and one in the right, between the inner and outer soles.  Doran’s old boots, a pair of low-cut calfskin numbers which had cost three dollars in the Sears Roebuck mail-order catalog, had shaved down the skin on his heels every day he’d worn them, right through a pair of stout wool socks.  The inside of those mail-order boots had stayed rough enough to punish his feet even after much of the seam stitching had disintegrated and the boots’ toes had cracked and peeled.

These new boots would never get wavy bumps and wrinkles over the toes because Shorty had stretched the leather over a crimping board before he wrapped the mulehide around the wooden last.  Shorty took care with each step of the process.  He was proud that he made boots for himself, for his brother Frank, and for Doran, his ranch hand, using one of four maple foot-shaped forms.  These lasts had once belonged to a bootmaker named Thomas Hardwick, whose claim to fame was that he’d made many pairs of boots for Teddy Roosevelt.  Shorty loved owning the lasts, and he liked leaving the impression with others that he and the Rough Rider wore the same szie boot.  Roosevelt was a foot taller, but Shorty, like the President of the United States, loved adventure, feared no one, and never tolerated authority long.

Diphtheria had deprived Roosevelt of a good bootmaker, and Hardwick’s tools were auctioned off.  Shorty had paid fifty cents for the set of four maple lasts, all of different sizes, and ten cents each for a half-moon skiving knife, a shoemaker’s hammer, a pegging awl, and a Sutton groover.  Before putting his purchases into the tool box in the bed of the wagon, Shorty had doused everything, from lasts to awl, with eighty-proof Jim Beam, to kill any traces of diphtheria.  The town physician, Doctor Morton, who had attended the auction and come away with a matched pair of kerosene lanterns with milk glass shades, observed Shorty’s precautions and tried telling Shorty that people caught diptheria from infected family members who coughed on them, but Shorty would have none of it.

Shorty distrusted all medical authority since his Army days.  When his regiment was sent to the Philippines.  He’d protected himself and his fellow soldiers from yellow fever by rubbing the soles of both feet with a mixture of lard and his own special homemade turpentine.  Doran thought Shorty had probably avoided yellow fever by signing up to go to the Philippines and not to Cuba when President McKinley had called for a hundred thousand volunteers to fight the Spanish.  But whether it had anything to do with turpentine or not, Shorty had never coughed up the black bile that was the sure sign that death was days away.  There was no convincing him that ordinary medicine had anything over his views on health.

When Shorty and his brother Frank had been discharged from the Army, in good health and in good spirits too, they used the separation payment they received to buy land for a Nebraska homestead and put up houses, Frank’s made of red brick and up the hill on the north half, Shorty’s constructed of local stone dragged piece by piece from the banks of the Platte, and built closer to the river on the southern end of the property.

Shorty had mortared the slabs of river rock into walls by using many, many wheelbarrow loads of powdered lime.  While waiting for each batch of mortar to set, the homesteader had dug a well, worked as a team with his brother to put barbed wire around each of their pastures, and scavenged enough scrap lumber from abandoned homesteads to build a hen house, a smokehouse, a corn crib, and a two-stall horse barn.

Once the walls were up and the roof was on the small stone house, Shorty had crafted the sparse collection of rough-plank furniture scattered around the one-room interior.  The room also held Shorty’s many tools and half-finished projects.  In addition to boots, Shorty made barrels, buckets, crates, and ladders.  He could also cook, doctor both people and animals, and barber those men who were not too particular about their hair.

As far as Doran could tell, the only thing Shorty couldn’t do was play the fiddle, and this was why the ranch hand, in new mulehide boots, was climbing uphill along the path from Shorty’s stone house to Frank’s brick home.  Frank’s wife Maybelle gave Doran weekly lessons on how to do double-stops and cross-overs, making even simple tunes like “Flop-Eared Mule” and “Liberty” sound a little fancy.  This week, Doran had been invited to dinner after his lesson.

Under his right arm, Doran carried a fabric-covered bundle, and at the heart of this bundle was his fiddle case.  Under the case, in his right coat pocket, a heavy object thumped against his thigh as he climbed the clay path up the hill.  As he passed Frank and Maybelle’s hog pen, he forced himself to tolerate the rancid odors of pig, mud, and manure.  Doran’s early years helping his father run a grist mill hadn’t readied him for the slop and stink of ranch life.  Even the shiny specks of chalcedony and jasper erupting from the sand and clay of the path were dull and gritty from the dust which floated constantly over Nebraskan soil.  A recent rain shower had dampened the bits of bright mineral and now silt clung to every bit of exposed surface of the tiny stones.

Doran turned off the narrow, gritty path at the top of the hill, slipping just a moment as his new boot soles slipped on the damp clay.  He got his balance and walked on, passing the Shuttleworths’ corn crib before he could hear strains of “Beautiful Dreamer” wafting to him from the red brick house.

As he got closer to the Shuttleworths' house, Doran could hear that the music was a duet.  From the path up the hill, he’d been able to hear Frank’s cornet, but now that he was in the front yard, his ears caught the mandolin accompaniment played by Frank’s wife Maybelle.  When Doran rapped on the front door, the music stopped and Frank, nickle-plated cornet in hand, came to greet Doran.

“Birthday boy’s here, Maybelle!” Frank called over his shoulder.

“He’s not a boy no more,” said Maybelle, smiling, as she came into the front hall.  “Twenty-one years old is a man.”  She looked at the bundle Doran had tucked under his arm.  “Oh good, you brought your fiddle.”

“I did,” said Doran, moving into the cool dimness of the narrow hallway as Frank and Maybelle stepped back into the parlor doorway.  “And I brought the birthday present Shorty gave me.”  He looked down at his feet.  “My other present, I mean.  He made these boots for me too.”  He looked down at his dusty feet, wondering if he shouldn’t have wiped them off some before stepping on Maybelle’s hand-worked rug.

Doran set his bundle down on the hall floor so he could slip off his coat and hang it on the wall peg.  Then he picked up the cloth bundle and brought it into the front parlor, where he laid it on a low oval table in front of the settee.  On the settee cushions, Maybelle’s oval-bodied mandolin, with its Italian scrollwork, rested on its round gourd-shaped bottom.  Doran adjusted the fabric-covered bundle on the oval table so that he could loosen the square knot in the braided leather strap which held the bundle together.  Then he unwrapped several windings of plain homespun cloth until he revealed a rectangular cedar box, with dovetail joints and a lid inlaid with white holly.  He carefully lifted the lid of the box, where a fiddle nested in turquoise upholstery fabric decorated with raised chenille flowers.  The turquoise lining held the rich aromatic scent of cedar.  The lid of the box was lined with the same soft fabric, and two soft leather straps cradled Doran’s fiddle bow against the delicate chenille flowers.

“You did a good job on that box, Doran,” said Frank.  “My brother’s not the only one who can cat fine wood and shape it.”

“I only know what he showed me,” said Doran. taking the fiddle from the box, and testing the instrument’s G string with his blunt-cut thumbnail.  “Remember when I came to work for him?”  Doran worked his facial muscles into a scowl and spoke in Shorty’s harsh, impatient voice.  “Don’t you know how to do nothing?”  Doran grinned.  “I told Shorty the day I met him that all I could do was plow.”

“And run the grist mill,” said Frank.  “You could grind flour, and fix the mill workings, and keep the steam boiler running.”

“And play the fiddle,” said Maybelle, picking up her mandolin from the cushions of the settee.  When you came here, you could already play ‘Cluck Old Hen’ and ‘Golden Slippers,’ and you kept good time, too.”

Doran reached for the fiddle bow, still strapped to inside of the cedar box’s lid, but his hand stopped in mid-reach when Frank said, “Now what did Shorty give you, aside from those fine boots?”

“Oh,  I completely forgot, didn’t I?” said Doran,  He carefully settled the dark-bodied fiddle into the cushioned lining of the rectangular box.  He moved from the parlor to the hallway, where his coat hung from a wall peg.  One side of the coat sagged from a weight in the big square side pocket.  Doran reached in and pulled out an oiled canvas case, which had a long narrow sleeve at one end.  The case was edged in black stitching and fastened with a large brass snap.

Doran brought the canvas holder into the parlor, unsnapped it, and drew the long barrow of a gun from the sleeve end of the oiled-canvas cover.

“Oh, mercy,” said Maybelle.  “I hope that’s not loaded, Doran.  I don’t allow loaded guns in the house.”

“That thing can’t shoot, Maybelle,” said Frank.  “That’s Shorty’s old cavalry gun.”

“It’s special to him,” said Doran defensively.  “He brought it back from the war with Spain.”

“It doesn’t shoot?” said Maybelle.  She cradled the body of the mandolin against her own full, soft waist.

“No, ma’am,” said Doran.  “The cylinder doesn’t turn right. so I can’t load it.”

“Good thing, too,” said Frank.  “Darn thing would surely blow up and take your hand right off.”

“If the cylinder was fixed so it lined up correct, it would be all right,” said Doran, letting the walnut grip rest in his left palm as he held the long barrel with his other hand.  “Most people think a Colt’s a good-looking gun.  The hammer’s nice on it, and Shorty didn’t get all that fancy engraving on it that looks like a lady’s garden trellis.  I like the plain nickel the way it is.”

“Shorty didn’t have that gun made,” said Frank.  “You know he wasn’t in the cavalry.  He bought that when we were down in Mania.”

“Don’t ruin Doran’s birthday present for him, sweetheart,” said Maybelle.  “You say it won’t shoot, Doran?”

Doran turned the Colt around backwards so the butt faced Maybelle.  He pulled the hammer back to half-cock, then opened the curved loading gate.  “See, this is where you’d put your cartridges in.”  He reached under the barrel, grasped the end of the ejector mechanism and brought it back, sliding the slim metal rod through the empty chamber.  “See?  Now this is what pushes the cartridge cases out when they’re spent.  But this part doesn’t turn right.  It’s wobbly.”  He touched the cylinder with a forefinger.  “The other cases are in the chambers, and I can’t load it because you have to turn the cylinder, click it around.”

“Can you fix it?” said Maybelle.  Her facial expression said she hoped not.

“No, ma’am,” said Doran.  “Maybe somebody who knew what he was doing could.”

“Shorty must think a lot of you to want you to have that pistol,” said Maybelle, slightly loosening her tight hold on the mandolin’s round body.   “He doesn’t give many gifts.”

“He doesn’t have much to give,” said Doran.

“He’s got a little more than what you might think,” said Frank.  “But I know he loves that cavalry gun.  So Maybelle’s right, it’s a real gift, just right for turning twenty-one.”

Doran had taken out his handkerchief and he now used it to polish the extra-long barrel, starting at the end-sight and working down toward the trigger guard.  Then he picked up the canvas case, shook it open, and inserted the barrel into the sleeve.  Doran fitted the walnut grip between the case’s curved seams, and snapped the brass fastener shut.  He carried the oiled-canvas case into the hallway and put it back in his right coat pocket, buttoning the pocket flap.

Returning to the parlor, Doran lifted his fiddle from its velveteen-lined box and freed the bow from the leather loops holding it.  Tucking the fiddle under his arm, he held the bow and turned the knob at the base, tightening the horsehair and arching the wooden rod.  Doran put the fiddle under his chin and bounced the bow on the strings.  He adjusted the knob a bit more, then tested the tautness of the bow-hairs again and found them acceptable.  He took a bit of amber resin from his pants pocket and held it up, turning it this way and that until he saw the sticky place where he’d scored the surface with his pocket knife the day before.  He slid this side of the resin chunk along the length of the bow-hairs, gliding the yellow chunk in small arcs to cover the tapered surface of the bow.

He pocketed the resin and looked at Frank, who used the ball of his thumb to wipe moisture from the cup of the cornet mouthpiece.  Frank put the horn to his lips and played a long A, then a D.  Maybelle plucked each of the double middle strings of her mandolin, while Doran ran his bow over first the A string of his fiddle, then the D.  Frank and Maybelle paused while Doran tried the E yo up high and the G down low, found them true, and played the first notes of “Beautiful Dreamer.”  Maybelle, then Frank, joined Doran in playing the gentle melody.

The three of them filled the parlor with good music for nearly an hour.  They played several rounds of “Soldier’s Joy,” and then Maybelle taught Frank and Doran a little reel she didn’t know the name of.  Maybelle and Doran played “Blackberry Blossom” while Frank sat and listened, the bell of his cornet resting on his knee.  Then he treated them to “Carnival of Venice” as a solo, and when he was finished, Doran and Maybelle applauded.  Frank blushed crimson.  Maybelle said it was about time to eat, and they put the instruments away, and the men went to the back porch to pour water over their hands with a dipping gourd while Maybelle carried serving bowls to the table.

At the wood-stove, Maybelle spooned helpings of a flaky-top chicken pot pie onto the dinner plates.  Doran carried these to the table, where Frank added mashed potatoes, okra, and crooked skinny carrots no bigger around than a lead pencil.

“I hated to pull those carrots up,” Frank said.  “But with no rain they were going to shrivel and if I left them much longer they would have froze up and turned bitter.”

“They taste good,” said Doran.  “They’re nice and sweet when they’re little.”  He looked down admiringly at the white tablecloth embroidered with a parade of red roosters, blue hens, and fluffy yellow chicks.  Back at the house made of river stone, he and Shorty ate on a rough pine plank table.  If Doran didn’t take time to wipe down the boards with a piece of rag torn from an old shirt, Shorty would bring the iron frying pan to the table and set it down among the leavings of the last meal.

As soon as he thought about how nice tablecloth was, there went three or four drops of chicken gravy on the white cloth.  He glanced up to see Maybelle looking right at him, but she didn’t seem concerned about the gravy stain.

“Here now, Doran,” she said, holding out a bowl.  “You finish up these potatoes.  My larder is all full of things for the church social and I can’t put nothing else in there.”

Doran looked at the large bowl of potatoes which Maybelle held out, and then at the white mound still on his plate.

“Give those right here,” said Frank, and smiling, he reached for the bowl.  “See how they do, Doran?” he said, scraping a large portion of fluffy potatoes onto his supper plate. “They feed you so good at those box socials when you’re going steady with them — the box is all loaded up with biscuits and ham and good apple pie.  Real good pie.”  He glanced at Maybelle, who was pretending to ignore him.  “And then when you’re married, you can’t get a bite of mashed potatoes or nothing.”  He looked down with mock sadness past his substantial stomach at his plate, which was loaded with the extra potatoes, plus second helpings of chicken pot pie and okra.

“Oh, Frank, for heaven’s sake,” said Maybelle, but she laughed.

“What did you do with your day, Doran?” Frank asked, splitting a biscuit and adding butter and honey to it.

“Went down to Evie and Soldier’s,” said Doran.  “Soldier had brought over Evie’s flour barrel that had the hoop coming off it, and their ox yoke had split out on one side.  Shorty got their things fixed up but he didn’t have time to haul them back, so he sent me in the box wagon.  He had garden truck to take over to the Spanish Store.”

“Did you see Evie?” said Maybelle.  “I know she hurt her back.”

“She’s doing all right,” said Doran.  “She was hanging out clothes when I got there, and I guess she carried the washtub of wet clothes out.”

“Or Soldier carried them for her,” said Frank, wiping biscuit crumbs from his mustache.  He stood and picked up his drinking glass.  “I’m going to go get some more of that good sweet tea.  You want a drop more, Maybelle?”

“I better not,” said Maybelle.  “If I just have the one glass with supper, I feel all right.”

While Frank was at the larder, refilling his glass from the big yellow pitcher, Maybelle laid her knife and fork across her plate and folded her napkin twice.  “Is Evie still having her nervous trouble, you think?” she asked Doran in a quiet tone.

“I don’t believe it’s as bad,” said Doran. “Her hands don’t shake so much, and Soldier said Evie don’t get up and wander at night like she was doing before.”

“Evie’s had so much happen to her that it’s no wonder she gets so nervous,” said Maybelle.  “If it had been me, I don’t believe I could have got through it all.”

Frank returned with his glass filled with amber-colored tea.  “Maybelle makes tea just right,” he told Doran, settling back into his chair at the head of the table.  “It’s never weak tea and it never takes the hide off your tongue.”

“Nothing to it,” said Maybelle, “as long as you have a clock or a watch or you can count.  If you put two heaping spoons of tea in the pot and make sure your water’s got a real good rolling boil, and you pour that over the tea till the water is up to the blue flower, and you leave it for six minutes.  Then you just pour off your tea and the leaves will stay in the bottom of the pot, and you can take and put those on your hydrangea bed and the flowers will get a nice blue color.”

“They’re nice flowers,” said Doran.  “Your flower beds grow awful good for being so far from the creek.”

“Frank made me a cistern,” said Maybelle.  “He and Shorty dug out a great big hole and then Frank tied a big old coal bin he got off the railroad to Rusty’s saddle and they dragged it up the hill and put it in the hole.  When it rains I take the lid off it and I can run a bucket down in there with a rope and get all the water the garden needs.”

“It takes more than water to grow a good garden,” said Frank.  “Maybelle, you have a touch with flowers and nobody can get them to blossom out like you do.”

“She can do so many things and it all comes natural to her,” said Doran to Frank.  “And Shorty can, and so can you, Frank.  It seems like you all got born knowing what to do but I have to learn how to do everything.”

“If your daddy had lived longer, you’d have learned from him,” said Maybelle.  “Frank and Shorty had their daddy till he was seventy-some years old.  But you were just a little thing when your father’s wagon turned over.  You never got the benefit of him showing you what to do.”  She looked across the table at Frank.  “Now, Frank, can you bring in the bread pudding?  I set it to cool on the porch with a dishtowel laid over it.”

Frank went out to the back porch, and Maybelle said, “I’m sorry I don’t have a cake, Doran.  The Spanish Store is all out of yeast cake and Frank won’t trade at Morrison’s.”

“That’s right,” said Frank, returning with the covered dish.  “I’ll eat bread pudding every day of the year before I’ll take my money in to spend at Sep Morrison’s dry-goods store.”

*****

After the meal, Doran helped to clear the table and wash up, then he went to the parlor to pack up his fiddle.  He wound the long strip of homespun cloth around the cedar fiddle-box, then secured the cloth with the braided leather strap.  In the front hallway, he put the bundle on the floor and took his coat from the wall hook.  As he swung the right side around his shoulder, the solid weight of the cavalry gun thumped against the leather belt which held the denim trousers up on his narrow frame.

Maybelle came into the hallway, a damp dish towel draped over her aproned shoulder.  “Frank went out to do the milking, but he says to tell you goodnight and to be careful on the clay path down the hill in those new boots.”

“I will,” said Doran, stooping to pick up the fiddle-box in its cloth wrapping.

“Happy birthday,” said Maybelle.  As the young man went out the front door into the night, Maybelle pushed something papery into his right hand.  He looked down and was startled to see a small wad of folded currency.  He tried to protest, but Maybelle had already given him a smile and a little wave and had shut the front door.

The Nebraska night was very dark.  Doran took a hand-rolled cigarette and a wooden safety match from his shirt pocket and scraped the match head with his thumbnail.  It didn’t light the first time, but on the second scrape there was a little hiss and flare as the tip of the match ignited and Doran quickly applied the flame to the end of his cigarette, shifting the fiddle-box out of the way.  Pulling smoke in through his mouth and let it escape from his nose, he held the burning match between thumb and forefinger while he dropped the little wad of paper money onto the top of his wrapped bundle.  Using his left thumb to spread the bills apart, he was just able to distinguish a five-dollar bill and two ones before the match went out.

It was too much.  Maybelle could have gotten herself a Sunday dress with seven dollars, with some change left.  Doran considered knocking on the front door, but Maybelle would probably be all the way at the back of the house.  Should he flatten the money and slide it under the front door?  No, that would hurt her feelings.  And he had a right to have a birthday present, he guessed.  He just wasn’t used to it.  Even when his father had been alive, there’d been no money for gifts.  And afterward, train fare back East for his mother and Ruthie had taken every bit of cash in the brown crock hidden behind the wood stove.  Once the mill had closed and his family was gone, Doran had come to work on the Shuttleworth homestead.

Last birthday he’d only been working for Shorty for a month, and Shorty had given him a good work shirt with plenty of wear left in it, and a new straight razor with a leather stropping piece.  Maybelle had replaced his old fiddle bow, which had hardly enough horsehair to meet the fiddle strings, with an old one she had, a good one with a brazilwood stick.

Now he’d been working twelve-hour days for Shorty for a year, and he’d helped out Frank and Maybelle plenty of times, catching hogs that had gotten loose from their pen, mending barbed-wire fencing, and cutting sod.  It was reasonable that on his birthday, especially his twenty-first birthday, that he received seven dollars, a good chicken pot pie dinner, a pair of mulehide boots, and an old cavalry pistol with a frozen cylinder.  These good things wasn’t too much, as long as he kept up to the standards people expected of him.

Doran finished his cigarette, stubbing it out carefully on his boot sole and saving the charred end in his tin box of tobacco bits.  He moved the cloth-covered box to a spot under his right arm, and in the quiet dark night, accented only by katydids and a few shuffles, grunts, and thumps from the livestock, Doran started down the dark path toward Shorty’s stone house.

Clouds moved over the moon’s face, shadowing Doran’s way.  He was forced to halt until the moonlight emerged again and let him see the shiny spots where early-evening showers had made the hard-packed clay slick and shiny, pockmarked with shallow pools lined with grit and sand.

It was hard going downhill toward Shorty’s house, and twice the slick soles of Doran’s new boots slipped on the path, making him grab at the spidery branches of scrubby chokeberry bushes to keep his balance.  On the third slip, he nearly dropped the precious fiddle-box, and he resolved to find a better way down the hill  Doran located a place where he could move left off the main path, and he pushed his way through the intermingled branches of blackberry and currant bushes till he reached the barbed-wire fence which marked the eastern boundary of the homestead.  A narrow path ran along the fence line.  It was faintly marked but less steep than the main path, and if he kept the fence at his left elbow he couldn’t get lost.

Doran finally reached the bottom of the hill and he swung around the tangled patch of raspberry canes, to cut across the alfalfa field.  A heavy blow across his left shoulder knocked him off his feet.  The fabric-swaddled box in his arms slid free and gently tobogganed down the hill, catching in the raspberry bushes.  Instinctively Doran felt another heavy blow about to descend, and he rolled away from the path and into the barbed-wire fence as an axe handle slammed into the narrow grassy path, leaving a deep dent where Doran’s body had been a moment before.

Click here to go to Part 2.