A Book of American Martyrs(46)
Seven miles in the opposite direction from St. Croix (population 11,400) was the smaller town of Bad Axe (population 3,040). Our mother had said, when we’d moved to rural Huron County from Saginaw, at least we’re not living in a place called Bad Axe. No one would believe me!
The clapboard farmhouse had been built atop an uneven knoll, an upstairs lump of land like a thumb. In the stone foundation was a faint numeral—1939.
The unpaved driveway veered and careened downhill to Salt Hill Road where the aluminum mailbox stood atilt and scarified from numerous collisions.
There had been another house in St. Croix which our parents had rented, or had intended to rent, several months before. This was a ranch-style house on a residential street (only just three blocks from St. Croix Elementary, which Melissa would attend) into which we’d been partly moved when something had gone wrong, a misunderstanding about the terms of the lease, or a disagreement between the landlord and my father, or a “dispute”—and the boxes we’d unpacked had had to be hastily and humbly repacked, and the rental trailer reloaded, so that within a single harried day we moved another time, to the very farmhouse on Salt Hill Road which my parents had seen, and had rejected, my mother with particular vigor, weeks before.
It was a vague promise of our father’s that we would find another, more suitable house in St. Croix soon.
To spare us the rural school buses, which had not been very pleasant for any of us, in the first week or so of school, our mother usually drove us to and from school.
(Our parents had asked us not to speak of the school buses. Not to complain. Bullying, harassment, sexual threats—“rough behavior”—we would be spared the rural-America school bus experience but were not to think that we were in any way superior to the boys who were the sons of our Huron County neighbors.)
(For our parents were adamant, idealistic, [usually] unyielding liberals. They did not believe in anything other than public schooling and hoped to convince each other that their children’s sojourn in the Huron County public school system would not sabotage our educations or our opportunity to attend first-rank universities.)
In the station wagon Darren was restless, fretting.
“Mom, did you call Dad? Does he know we’re coming to meet him first?”—Darren couldn’t resist asking.
“Darren, no. I have to drop the car off at the garage to get it inspected. You know that.”
“But—”
“We’ll get to the Center before your father leaves. Please don’t catastrophize!”
That was our father’s most earnest admonition to his family—Please don’t catastrophize. This was an entirely made-up word, we would one day discover. And it did not—ever—apply to our father himself.
Dad operated within so tightly wound and so intricately structured a schedule, nearly always running late, fleeing phone calls, searching for mislaid car keys, wallet, sometimes even his shoes, he could not bear the anxieties of others in addition to his own.
It was sharp-eyed Darren who’d discovered just that morning that the inspection sticker on the Chevy station wagon was outdated by five months. With grim-gleeful reproach he’d run to tell our mother that she was in danger of getting a ticket, possibly getting arrested, driving without a valid 1997 sticker issued by the Michigan Department of Motor Vehicles—“You or Dad better take the car to get inspected, fast!”
Dad had his own, newer car, that is his pre-owned 1993 Volvo, and Mom had inherited the 1991 Chevy station wagon for her full-time use. Thus responsibility for the station wagon had fallen between the two adults like a ball indifferently dropped, rolling heedlessly about at their feet, unacknowledged.
The original plan for the day had been to meet Dad for lunch at one o’clock at a lakeshore restaurant called The Cove, which was our parents’ new favorite restaurant, overlooking Lake Huron five miles north of our house; Dad would be driving to The Cove from the center of St. Croix, a distance of two miles. That morning, however, without consulting him, Mom had conceived of a “brilliant—and pragmatic” new idea: we would drive to St. Croix and drop the station wagon off at a garage, and we would walk the short distance to the women’s center where Gus Voorhees was physician-in-chief, and surprise him—“You kids never see your father at work. You deserve that.” Then, Mom reasoned, our father would drive us all to The Cove, and by the time we returned from lunch, in the early afternoon, the station wagon would be ready to be picked up at the garage.
Of course, prissy Darren objected to this plan on two grounds: it was a change of plans, which seemed to nettle him on principle; and, what if our father left for The Cove before we got to the women’s center, how would we get to the restaurant?
“Don’t be ridiculous, Darren. We’ll get to the Center by twelve-thirty. Your father won’t leave for the restaurant until at least quarter to one. Gus Voorhees has never been early for anything, and he isn’t likely to start today.”
“I think you’d better call Dad anyway.”
“Your father doesn’t like nuisance calls at work. We’ll just surprise him.”
“It isn’t a nuisance call. It’s us!”
“Your father doesn’t like unnecessary calls. He’s a busy man.”
“But—what if he leaves early for the Cove?”
Brainless as a parrot my brother was repeating himself. And so grim was he presenting these superficial objections, our mother laughed at him. How could that possibly happen! Why was he being so silly! There was something edgy and provocative in our mother’s laughter like the scratching of fingernails on a blackboard.