“On the wall,” he answered. “Where else? Don’t you know nothing?”
So I dropped it, thinking I would find out soon enough.
It was an hour until we milked—which seemed a week—and another hour after we finished milking and separating to eat supper and change clothes. After wolfing food—almost but not quite keeping up with Louie—Harris ran upstairs and changed. He came down in moments with clean bibs on—still without a shirt, without shoes, and the side buttons open on the bibs showed he had no underwear on. I put on a clean tee shirt and came downstairs to find that even Louie had dressed for the occasion. He had changed shirts—not to a clean one (I don’t think anything he ever wore was clean) but a different dirty one.
Knute and Clair and Glennis were all fresh and clean—Knute was wearing a newly ironed work shirt and I realized I had seen Clair ironing it two days before, heating the iron on the back of the stove and pressing a bit at a time.
Knute drank another cup of coffee, then nodded and without speaking went outside, leading the entourage to the truck.
The truck was old—how old was and is open to conjecture. As was the actual make. It had been patched and rebuilt so many times with so many different parts that it might have been a Ford or a Dodge or even a Chevrolet. Whatever it was, it had been dead for a long time and Knute kept it running with a Lazarus approach, a mixture of miracle and work.
It didn’t have a battery and we all stood watching while he cranked it, advanced the spark a bit, cranked it again, advanced the spark a little more, and cranked once more. This time it kicked so hard it nearly broke his arm. He swore eloquently—I began to understand where Harris found his ability—and then backed off on the spark, cranked once more, and it started with a sound like the pistons were exchanging holes.
He stood, smiling, and we all clambered in. That is, Glennis, Clair, and Knute got in front. Louie climbed in the rear of the truck and sat on the bed, his back to the cab, and Harris and I joined him.
I still had no idea where we were going but everybody was so glad to be doing it that I fell in with the enthusiasm.
“We don’t get to town that often,” Harris screamed—a full bellow was necessary to override the sound of the engine. There was no muffler at all and very little tailpipe. What pipe there was ended at the front of the bed so the full din of the engine came up around us. “It’s the best thing there is, especially if we get some pop to go with the picture show...”
I got about every third word and he had to translate over the engine sound and he finally gave up.
Knute turned right at the end of the driveway and we started driving—ricocheting might be a better word—down a mud track that went through miles of forest.
When we’d done this for half an hour we came into a clearing a mile across—hacked out of the forest the way Knute’s farm had been cleared—and in the middle of this clearing stood four frame buildings and a tall sheet-metal covered grain elevator. A set of railroad tracks ran alongside and past the four buildings.
Harris smiled widely and pointed. “Town.”
I said nothing, but the way it looked reminded me of nothing so much as some villages I’d seen in the Philippine Islands—a scattered collection of huts thrown in the middle of nowhere.
We bounced across the tracks, turned on a dirt road that went in front of the buildings, and stopped in front of a clapboard-sided shanty that seemed about to fall in on itself. It had no windows in the front or the sides but an open door and a crude wooden porch across the front. Above the door in rough, handpainted letters were the words:
LUMBERJACK LOWNGE
The other three buildings looked much the same except one of them had a glass window in the front and was apparently a dry goods store.
I couldn’t for the life of me see what everybody was so excited about. There were already six or seven trucks parked in the street—not in any order, just left where they stopped, as Knute now did with our truck—and as the engine died with a gasp, a thin boy about my age walked out of the door and onto the porch. He was holding a bottle of Nesbitt’s orange pop and as soon as he saw our truck he turned and tried to get back in the door.
He was far too slow.
“Hunsetter, you gooner!” Harris bellowed as he piled over the side of the truck. “Where the hell is my aggie shooter?”
Harris bounced once on the ground and landed on top of the boy. Orange pop sprayed in the air as they went down and rolled into the street in a cloud of dirt and curses. It was a view of Harris I was becoming accustomed to, and I was wondering if I should help or get a bucket of water or pry them apart with a stick when Clair took my arm.
“Come on inside, dear. They’ll be in when they’re done playing...”
It was becoming evening and the room was dark—the only light came through the open door—and it took a moment for my eyes to get accustomed to the dim light.
When they did I saw a plank bar down the left side of the room with no stools, three tables on the right with benches instead of chairs. At the back of the room there was a small wooden platform next to what I took to be a back door. On the platform there were two fiddle cases and an accordion so big it seemed that it would
