Rhizomania, Part 10

“We went every day,” said Shorty, sounding astonished at the younger man’s ignorance. “I had a good job on the work crew that laid in all those lagoons and canals –“

“Lagoons?”

“Don’t you know nothing?” said Shorty, mopping his face with his bandanna, then tucking the damp cloth into his pants pocket. “The fairgounds was all water up the middle. The Grand Basin and canals off the main basin, leading off in every direction.With gondola boats, like a canoe but the ends curl up.  And then there was islands. Lagoons and waterways around the islands. Who do you think dug all that out?” 

Shorty leaned over, reached out and picked up a well-worn work boot from a wall shelf. He grasped the broken-off end of some loose stitching with his thumb and forefinger, and began to pull the stiff, dirty thread away from the leather. “Some of the other fellas thought the foreman might not want me to hire on. Thought I was too little. But when I went to see him, I told him, “You let me dig all morning, and all afternoon, and if you ain’t happy, then you don’t pay me. You feed me, but if you don’t think enough dirt’s been moved, I won’t take a nickel off you.”

“They kept you on,then?” said Doran, leaning out the door to toss the tomato scraps to the flock of chickens. The yard birds squawked and fanned their wings at each other while grabbing red juicy tomato bits.

“I worked from the day after they broke ground till three days after the whole dang place burnt down.”  He set aside the old boot and began to roll a cigarette.

“It burnt down?” said Doran, still holding the empty slop pail.

“Somebody burnt it, you mean.” Shorty licked the edge of the cigarette paper, and his thumbs made quick work of rolling the paper cylinder around the grains of tobacco.

Just as Shorty had thriftily saved a match by lighting his cigarette from an ember in the wood stove, there was a series of businesslike knocks, which rattled the roughly-constructed plank door.  Shorty, cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth, went to the door, with a pause as he eyed the Winchester hung on two nails on the front wall of the little house. But he decided, evidently, that nobody meaning trouble would knock so loud, and he opened the wooden door.  A neighbor, Mr. Nemecek, stood in the dooryard, holding a brown earthenware crock in both hands.  

“Hey there, Mr. Nemecek,” said Shorty, looking delighted. “Doran, come on up here! Mr. Nemecek’s here to see you!”

“I have come to visit you, Cecil,” said Mr. Nemecek.  “I have brought urda cheese, very very good. I know Frank’s wife makes butter and good yellow cheese but I have brought my wife's urda cheese.” He held out the brown pot, which had an inset lid, its handle shaped like a beehive. “This pot is for putting in honey, but instead Olga has put in urda cheese.”

Shorty, puzzled for a moment, noted Mr. Nemecek’s hair, which overlapped his collar in a ragged fringe.  “Come in, Mr. Nemecek,” he said, taking the crock and handing it to Doran. “I wasn’t sure if you needed doctoring or your hair cut. Have a seat.” Shorty pulled a cane-bottom chair away from the table, brushed hush-puppy crumbs away, and offered the seat to his guest.  

Mr. Nemecek, a large-bodied man, hung his hat from the back of the chair next to him, and settled into the rickety chair, which creaked but held. Shorty went to the wall over his bunk, where a nail held a pair of shears, dangling from one finger grip.  

“Your doctoring is fine, too,” said Mr. Nemecek. “My toe has healed very very good from the cut.”

“Young boneset leaves mixed in lard is the only thing to use on a bad cut like that, from a hoe or some such,” said Shorty, who brought a clean feed sack to drape over Mr. Nemecek’s shoulders. “I was just telling Doran about my late wife, Mr. Nemecek. This young man’s twenty-one years old, plenty old enough to get settled down, don’t you think?”

“I was not married until I was thirty years,” said Mr. Nemecek. “The Bohemians like for the husband to show he is good for working.”

Shorty paused respectfully for a moment, then went on. “Your daughter Barbara’s a pretty girl,” he said. “She’s eighteen or nineteen, I guess.” He used the tip of his shears to trim around Mr. Nemecek’s left ear, then deftly snipped off some hair tufts protruding from the ear canal itself.  

“Twenty years,” said Mr. Nemecek, tilting his head so Shorty could get at the other ear.  

“Shorty was just telling me about taking Winnie to the world’s fair in Chicago,” said Doran quickly.  “What year, Shorty?”

“It was in “93,” said Shorty. “A year late than the plan said. It was the Columbian Exposition, for four hundred years since Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue.  But we ran into construction problems.” Shorty used his calloused fingers to push Mr. Nemecek’s hair forward. “The St. Louis fair was a year late too. The big men don’t ask the ones that do the work, they just smoke big cigars and make big plans.” Shorty snipped away at the thin patch of hair at the top of Mr. Nemecek’s head.

“You don’t need to cut this hairs up there, I think,” said Mr. Nemecek ruefully. “Falls out anyway.”

“I like to give a man his money’s worth,” said Shorty. He moved to Mr. Nemecek’s back and began scissoring away strands of blond hair, which covered the draped feed sacking.  

“What all did you take Winnie to see?” said Doran.  “You said you and her went every day.”

“I had my ticket book,  the one they give to all the workers,” said Shorty. “I had another book too, that had  half the tickets in it. Tom Gates, poor fella, got knocked off the scaffold when the gang was putting up the Horticulture Building, and broke both of his legs. The foreman give me Tom’s ticket book. Me and another hand shared out the extra tickets.”

“So Winnie went to the fair with you every day?” asked Doran.  

“No, she wasn’t up to it some of the time,” said Shorty. “Them was the days I used up my tickets on Little Egypt.” He carefully lifted the feed sack from his customer’s shoulders, and took it, folded in half, to the open doorway and shook it, dispersing fine blond hairs into the Nebraska wind. The chickens looked up, mildly interested.

“Egypt?” said Mr. Nemecek. “Not Chicago?”

“Little Egypt!” said Shorty. “You know, the shake dancer!” He did his version of a shimmy, then looked  a little embarrassed. “Me and Winnie wasn’t married yet.  Sometimes I seen Little Egypt, and sometimes I went to the World’s Congress of Beauties. Winnie didn’t want me to, but I told her it was like them ladies at the Women’s Building. Forty ladies from forty nations.” He laughed.

“Women don’t want to go where there’s a lot of men,” said Mr. Nemecek.

“Now you know I’d never have took Winnie down to the Midway,” said Shorty, shaking his head gently from side to side. “She didn’t want to go to the low-down places. She always wanted to be a teacher.  She was raised right. Real refined lady, too good for me.” He smiled at a just-recalled memory. “The best time we ever had was on the Fourth of July, when we took the elevator up to the promenade on the roof of the Manufactures Building to see the fireworks. The colors was so bright, green and red and blue.”

“Did Winnie like it?” Doran asked.

“While we was up there, I asked her would she marry me,” said Shorty, “and she said she would. So I guess that tells you something.”

He turned to Mr. Nemecek, who held out a dime.  The smaller man smiled and pocketed the coin.  “Guess you want to get home before it gets dark. You want Doran to ride along with you? There was some bad men around here last night. Doran could visit with you and your family a bit and then come on back.”  Shorty turned to Doran. “Don’t stay real late and wear out your welcome.”

“I better stay here and get the chores done,” said Doran.  

When he saw how relieved Mr. Nemecek seemed to be at his refusal, Doran felt regret take a little bite out of him.  That Barbara was an awfully pretty young woman, with green eyes and a warm smile. And her daddy was not thinking of Doran as a worthy suitor, seemed like. No matter what Shorty thought. 

Mr. Nemecek was now examining himself in a dark-speckled piece of looking-glass which hung next to the front door. “It is a good haircut,” he said. “My wife use her scissor for sewing, and she is cutting the uphill way, not so smooth. “Also, my ear has received a slice from the scissor if my wife uses.”

“I don’t cut nothing but hair,” said Shorty, using his teasing tone. “I ain’t a surgeon.”

Mr. Nemecek laughed. “That’s funny, yes. My wife is a surgeon!” He picked up his hat from the back of the chair next to the tabnle, said a cordial goodbye to Doran, and took his leave.

“Lord, son,” said Shorty. “You’re going to be sad later after you let that Barbara girl get away from you.”

“Her father don’t want me to court her,” said Doran.  “He wants a man that has his own land.”

“It ain't about what he wants, it’s about what you want,” said Shorty. “And you’ll get you some land soon enough.”

“I guess it used to be easier a long time ago, when you was courting Winnie,” said Doran. “All you had to do was take Winnie up on a roof to watch the fireworks.”

“Good thing I did, too,” said Shorty. “There was a fire the next week and people couldn’t go up on the roof no more.”

“Was that when the whole place burnt down?” said Doran.

Shorty gave Doran a look. “Now, how could Winnie and me keep going if the whole place burnt?  There was always some little old fire somewhere on the grounds, with all the 'lectric this and 'lectric that.”

“They had electricity in 1893?” said Doran, amazed.  

“Lord, son, you should have seen that light shooting out of the Electrical Building onto the Administration Building. Great big round roof on it, with little lights running up and down it, and the reflection of all them little bulbs was shining in the water of the Grand Basin. Tell you what, Winnie was scared of how bright it was.”

“She didn’t care for the electric lights?”

“She said it didn’t seem natural,” said Shorty. “But she got sorta used to it after the first few nights. We used to go down to the bandstand in the evenings, and there was that man in the white gloves, with the red uniform  I’ll think of his name in a minute here...   Sousa! That’s it, the man’s name was Sousa and he had a whole band dressed up in red military uniforms. And every night they would play 'After the Ball Is Over.' Winnie just loved that song, and she pulled me out to the middle to dance. We'd dress up and then spin around on that brick pavilion.”

“Did you dance good?” asked Doran, amused, as he scraped the dinner leftovers into the slop pail.

“No, but it was real crowded so we wasn’t seen anyway,” said Shorty. He went to the corner and picked up a contraption fashioned from an old hoe handle. The wooden pole had a baling-wire loop at one end. Shorty used this to snare a pair of boots hanging from the rafters and bring them down. He set the boots down on the plank table and began to use a folding knife to pry off a badly-worn heel plate.

Doran got busy too. By the time he'd fed the hogs and chickens, and brought up two pails of water from Winters Creek, keeping a sharp watch along the dark path down to the stream and back, he was exhausted. His shoulder, still sore from the blow delivered by the axe handle, ached deeply and his eyes felt hot, dusty, and dry.  

Shorty was still at the table, repairing a second pair of worn boots when Doran, ready for bed, pulled off his shirt and trousers and slipped a nightshirt over his head. He laid down, and was so very glad to do it. The straw inside Doran’s mattress crackled as he folded his woolen shirt to form a pillow, and settled himself on his right side, with the pressure off his wounded shoulder.


A short, loud bang woke Doran. His chest pulsed with a rapid heartbeat. His heart slowed as he sat up, then put his legs over the edge of his lumpy straw mattress, and tried to clear his head. He rubbed rough palms over the bristled planes of his bony face. Had he really heard a loud sound, or dreamed it?

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