At the tower of my grandfather’s church a carillon plays “God Bless America” at noon, “Old McDonald” at six o’clock, and assorted carols at Christmas.
There’s an old red-brick courthouse behind Puck Park with its pond of swans and ducks swimming around, and a gleaming white city hall with marble steps leading up to six white columns.
There are elaborate modern high schools, the Super-Duper markets, the four-in-one cinema, The Soda Shoppe, all here and all in danger of becoming extinct.
For the thing that keeps new industry from moving to La Belle and makes La Belle most strange is Cayuta Prison. It sits in the center of the town, with a high wall around it and gun-carrying guards posted in towers at four sides.
My grandfather says it is like a boil on the rear end of a beautiful lady, although that’s one opinion he’s never shouted from the pulpit.
At first when the Japanese trap plant moved here, everyone went bananas over La Belle’s good luck in getting it.
Then the Chamber of Commerce began wondering how it could sell the town to other heads of industry when all they saw on the bus to La Belle were Japanese businessmen and men manacled to other men.
The Chamber of Commerce began complaining that La Belle no longer looked like an all-American typical small town.
Little did they dream what was in store for them that would cloud the picture even more.
Last spring, after a long winter of my mother staging horrible parties where I was to make friends with my classmates from La Belle High, my mother sat me down for a talk.
“Well, Little Little,” she said, “I am ready to admit I have been going at this thing all wrong. If I was a big person in a world of little people, I myself might be reluctant to try making friends with them, although I think I would have made some effort.”
“I don’t need friends,” I said.
“Oh, honey, there’s where you’re wrong. Your father and Cowboy and I aren’t going to be around forever, you know, and anyway you have to have a life, sweetheart. Someday get married, someday have children.”
“Why?” I said.
“I just told you why. Your father and I and Cowboy aren’t going to be around forever is why. Then what happens to you?”
“I’ll get along,” I said.
“Well, I’m not going to spend my days and nights worrying that you might not,” my mother said, “so I am joining POD. Little Little, we’re going to lick this thing, beginning this summer. We’re going to open our house to the TADpoles and you are going to make yourself some real friends!”
There is no arguing with my mother, once her mind is made up.
From Memorial Day through Labor Day, “diminutives” began pouring into La Belle, crowding onto the bus from Syracuse with the Japanese businessmen and the convicts. The Howard Johnson motel was overrun with them, and at Cayuta Lake Yacht Club, which is across from where we live on the lake, members and guests relaxing on the lawn looked out at gangs of TADpoles jumping off our raft, crawling around our sailboats, paddling our canoes, running down our beach front, and sunning themselves atop rocks protruding from the water.
We have nothing against the little people, the head of the Chamber of Commerce wrote in an appeal to my grandfather, but you can see, can’t you, that their presence in our midst confuses heads of industry as they size up La Belle as an ideal, average small town in which to raise their families?
There is nothing, Reverend La Belle, that we can do about the prison, and we dearly need the Twinkle Traps factory to survive. Would it be possible for Mrs. La Belle to curtail, or halt altogether, her participation in this particular organization’s activities?
My grandfather responded with a demand for suitable facilities for “La Belle’s new and most welcome visitors,” insisting that in some convenient downtown area there should be a scaled-down drinking fountain, urinals, and telephone booth.
On his sermon board outside the First Presbyterian Church there was a message reading: Welcome to The American Diminutives and TADpoles and PODs…. “See that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently.” New Testament: I Peter 1:22.
Cowboy knew my plans.
“They’re very Japanese,” she said.
“My plans aren’t Japanese, they’re just my plans.”
“They’re Japanese. Marrying someone you hardly know.”
“I’ve been writing to him since last July,” I said. “You just have Japanese on the brain.” We were talking about Knox Lionel, a young preacher known as “Little Lion,” whom grandfather La Belle had invited to Cayuta last summer.
“You don’t know what he’ll be like.”
“Mommy says you never know what a man’s really like until after you’ve married him.”
“Mommy just wants you to get safely married.”
“Or just married,” I said.
“She worries too much about you, Little Little.”
We were in our room discussing this, the morning of the Boots/Bombers game, my birthday weekend. None of my guests would arrive before late afternoon.
At one time Cowboy and I had separate rooms, our parents operating on some theory we needed separate identities, as though we could ever confuse ourselves. But our parents try. They would fry up Brillo pads and eat them salted if they thought it would help anything. So at one time I was in my little dollhouse room with everything in miniature, and Cowboy was across the hall with her baseball bat, basketball, bowling ball, golf clubs, and tennis racquet jammed into her closet, and we’d visit.
It was our own idea to move in together. My little things are on one side of the room—the neat side—and her big things and big mess are across from me.
Cowboy sank her large hands into the pockets of her jeans and
