TheBanyanTree: Sidda's novel #4

[Terri W.]

I tood the long way, the scenic route, home from the Bucheks' house.  I walked right through downtown.  There was nobody around, since it was the dinner hour.  Florsheim Shoes is closed.  The Corner Drugstore -- which has sat in the middle of the block ever since it lost its lease and had to move ,back in 1962 -- is still open.  I can see Cully Trott's bald pate bent over the Pharmacy counter at the back of the store.  He is counting up the till and then he will stow it all in a safe, lock up, and call it a night.  He may stop on his way home to deliver some medicine to people.  Cully knows everyone's secrets.  He knows what drugs we all take.  He knows how much.  He knows who is the sickest among us.  He would remove his own tongue with a claw hammer before he would betray that confidence.  Cully Trott is a good man.

I walk the highway home.  It goes out past the Methodist church.  I see that Mrs. Wagner has again taken it upon himself to water the flowers that surround the church's marquee.  Her husband used to do it.  And he used to complain about it endlessly to his wife.  If he didn't water the flowers, he groused, nobody on earth would.  A couple of times a year he would abstain from his voluntary watering duties.  He'd give the whole Methodist congregation The Silent Treatment, issuing an unsaid challenge to all of them to take pity on the poor parched flowers and water them.  And sure enough, twice a year, the flowers would just "die!  just up and die!  The goddam Bohemians cain't even be bothered to water their own goddam flowers!"  Mrs. Wagner, who always talked a great deal except when Mr. Wagner was around, would cluck and shake her head.  Then, when Mr. Wagner was out playing golf, she'd chat to neighbors about the dilemma, understanding that nobody watered the flowers because, I mean, why should they?  Mr. Wagner aways did.  And when the flowers got brown and keeled over, well, that was Mr. Wagner's business.  If someone else watered them, he might take offense, like they thought he wasn't doing his job right. 

You have to step lightly in a small town.  Nothing is a secret.  At lease, not a complete secret.  At least, not for long.  At least, not for ever.

I had to keep adding to that sentence because, of course, I was talking about me.

Mr. Wagner had a stroke two years ago.  He doesn't talk to anyone now.  Well, he taks gibberish, which only Mrs. Wagner an their oldest daughter from Houston can understand.   This past summer, he stopped talking to them altogether.  Mrs. Wagner panicked and feared he'd had another stroke.  I t turned out, though, that he was just giving her The Silent Treatment.  He wanted her to water the flowers.  So now she does.

The highway is not a well-travelled public road like you might be imagining.  It is a skinny, gravelly, meandering stretch of asphalt and tar with deep grassy ravines on each side.  The ravines are to keep livestock from wandering into some speeding vehicle's path.  They also serve to protect sleepy motorists.  Running off the road even a little bit here is enough to set any road trip back a day and a half.  By the time you get the help you need, and a tow truck and mechanic and parts, you will have talked yourself out of ever driving yourself to any destination ever again.  At the very least, that day and half will teach you to keep your eyes open.

I stood across the highway from my house for a good fifteen minutes before I came in.  I wondered, for the thousandth time, if Daniel stood there before he crossed the highway last Spring.  You can see so much more on foot than if you were just driving by.  I will always wonder how he knew not to just drive on by.

There is only one house now, of course.  But it will be more interesting to you, I think, perhaps, to compare the two houses as he saw them. Everything in the world has changed since then, of course, but it's important that you know about the Before before the After.  

The woodframe structures clearly began, many years ago, with the same blueprints and builder. Both had two stories -- the second story set back a little ways from the first, piggy-back style. Windows were lined up on all sides, because this is Texas, and so cross-ventilation is a moral imperative. 
The house on the right is where my mother and sister and I live, and lived.  It had a covered porch with a swing.  A small leaning building was tucked neatly behind it.  A clothesline peeked out from back there, too, which was full of feminine-type laundry apparell the day Daniel stood here.  Most of the roof of the  house was shaded by the sturdy and elegant live oak tree I think I already mentioned.  Moss hung on the branches like long locks of renaissance hair.  A weathered picket fence ran for a few dozen feet along the highway at the front of the house. It was just for looks, there were no side boundaries marked. This house started out with good intentions.  It began its life with modest ambitions and solid hopes.  It worked hard to get to a good place, with a porch and a fence and a structure out back. Something sad happened, though -- and you already know what that was -- and now the house was barely keeping up its brave front.  It had a tired posture. Peeling paint. Missing shingles. Rusted hardware. Things didn't work out the way this house had planned.   It was only a matter of time before it fell to pieces around our heads.  Every day that passed by brought another broken screw or spring,   We were our own country with universal economic sanctions against it.

The house on the left had no porch in front, no building out back.  It had only two concrete steps, then an old screen door, with wood so warped and wire so wavy, it looked like it had been taken to with a battering ram.  That's our humidity.  I once looked up Friendship's climate in the bookmobile's Texas almanac , and it said simply: "Sub-tropical."  Anything stretched tight -- wire screens, leather goods, piano strings, anything -- ultimately gave up with a sigh or groan, and stretched itself way out like a lazy cat. 

Big rusty oil drums were scattered around the second house and yard. Black-orange and pockmarked, the old drums look huddled and depressed. A gleaming silver and white satellite dish towered smugly above them. 

Between the two houses was a tilled garden.  This was last February, at the end of a mild and wet winter, so the garden was already quite wild and lush-looking. Morning glories twined around the tomato cages. Linaria, like fairy flowers, bobbed their tiny heads atop thread-thin stalks. The rose bushes had blooms, and also sprouted the deep burgundy brown of fresh new growth.  Railroad ties, rich with creosote, were angled in and around the cultivated ground, as if some great airborne shipment had exploded in the sky.

An unexpected sound on the left would draw you back to the unshaded house.  A bark,  An unmistakeable, very excited bark.  If your eyes scanned the grounds, you'd find nothing to see.  A movement would bring your gaze up.  And there it was.  The daschund on the roof.  An apoplectic little wiener dog was bopping and bobbing across the sloping shingles, yap yap yapping and flap flap flapping its damn fool head off. 

And he's always up there, on any given day that is without rain.  That's just one of the things you'd probably miss if you were driving by.