Skin and Bones

Chapter 1-3

Alvin Burgmeier was perched on the concrete bench in front of the Toulouse Public Library holding a match to a Tareyton when Micah Stevens came racing past on his red Huffy. Alvin didn’t know the boy’s name, but he came in the library once in a while. He marveled at how fast the kid was pushing that bike. Many years removed from the last time he’d found himself envious of the young, now he was just glad he could remember having been that age at all. The kid disappeared over the hill and a fat crow, who had also been watching the kid, turned its attention to Alvin. He exhaled a ring of smoke that drifted halfway up to the bird before it disappeared into the crisp clean air of rural America. Alvin was seventy-four and for fifty-one years he’d taken his smoke breaks on this very bench. Every fall the crows returned to pick over what was left of the corn harvest and every year they roosted in the bell tower of the Methodist Church across the street. He’d read somewhere that crows remember people’s faces and this one seemed to be studying him as if to ask, “Are you the same bastard I saw smoking on that bench the last time I was here?”

“Yes,” Alvin said. The crow leaned in a little as if to confirm, then took wing. “Yeah, it’s me. Move along and go pester someone else, you old crow.”

Speaking of old crows, he needed to be done with his cigarette before the old maid Cuthbertson arrived with her cronies for their monthly book club meeting. If she saw him sitting there smoking, she’d have something to say about it. Last time she caught him in his spot she piped up with:

“You’ve smoked so many cigarettes in that spot that the shadow of your skinny little butt is going to be there when you’re gone, just like the shadows of those poor j**s who were burned up in a flash when Truman dropped the big one.” She cackled like a witch. “You know how the shadows of those people remain to this—”

“Yes, I know,” he’d interrupted.

He snuffed out the cigarette alongside its brothers in the sand of a little metal pail he kept next to the bench. He’d been off duty since Jenny Allard came in to spell him after she got out of her last class of the day at Toulouse High.

Jenny looked up from a mystery novel as he approached. The girl loved her mysteries. He returned her smile and proceeded through the storage room to a narrow stairwell that twisted its way down to his basement apartment.

On his kitchen table was his history of Toulouse, 173 pages of typed, double spaced prose, nearly complete, but still lacking a title. By his estimation, he’d written about 80,000 words and the hardest ones seemed to be the ones that would be above his name on the cover. His hope was that today he would come up with that elusive appellation. He cranked open the window. He wasn’t supposed to smoke down here, but ask any working writer to get something done without their chosen vice, well, that’s about as hard as selling a book without a title.

He lit another Tareyton and scowled at the blank top page for a desperately long minute. It was time to dig in his heels and get to work. He put the cigarette in the ash tray next to his Royal 10 typewriter and flipped over the first page of the manuscript. Maybe something he’d written would get the wheels turning. Maybe a stellar title for this thing was hidden somewhere in those 80,000 words.

Preface

I was sitting on Larry Dale’s front porch. The ice in the glass of lemonade his wife had offered me popped as it thawed. I knew Larry’s story, but I needed to hear it firsthand, and I was running out of time. I’d overheard talk down at the diner that the doctors had given Larry less than two months, sent him home so he could go comfortable. The pain was on his face and his wife had been hospitable because that was her nature, but it was evident to me that she’d not wanted her husband bothered. When the pleasantries were put aside I got around to it. She frowned and hurried inside.

“Writing a book, are you?” Larry said softly, looking at me. “A book about the town?”

I nodded.

He grimaced a little and absently ran his hand across his belly, “And you want to know about the fireworks? Well, that’s really . . .” He was searching for a word. Just about the time I felt like he might find it he started coughing. When the fit ended, he was confused again.

“You were there,” I said.

He sighed, “Well, you’re goddamn right. I can still hear the first deafening explosion if I close my eyes and think on it. I was nine years old and me and some of the other boys were playing a furious game of tag on the lawn by the Morris General Store. That’s a little before your time.”

“I know where it was.”

He raised his chin and looked at me. “Of course, the consummate historian.” I could tell that he wanted to chuckle, but I could also tell it hurt too much. He gathered himself and went on, “It was just some boys killing a little time ’til dark. It was July the Fourth, 1896. Over on the corner of Main and Joyce a wagon had been set up full of fireworks, and they aren’t like they are now. They weren’t . . . what’s the word I’m looking for?”

He lit a cigarette and offered me one. I accepted.

“Sophisticated?”

“Yeah, you could say that. Hell, they were as unpredictable as a one-eyed mule. It was a windy day and that was the biggest problem. Must have been a storm coming, but it never got here. I reckon someone tossed a cigarette down or something, that’s what everybody thought. There was a fella named Goldstein who set up shop selling women’s hats and petticoats and the like.” Larry coughed and I felt a shiver run down my spine at the wetness of it. It made my own lungs hurt just hearing it. “I guess the fella smoked and someone had seen him walk past, or so they said. He didn’t last long in town after that. Don’t know if you should put that in your book, though because I reckon he had nothing to do with it. I think folks didn’t like him for the same goddamn reason we still got problems today. He was different than them, a Jewish fella.”

We sat for a moment silently brooding over our cigarettes. When he started again his voice creaked and made me think of rusty hinges on a barn door. Instead of being embarrassed, he smiled. “It’s funny. My voice did that when I was growing up and now it’s doing it again as I’m going out.”

He fell quiet which made plenty of sense. He was on some pretty powerful medicine. I’d seen it on the kitchen counter as his wife led me out to the back porch. His lids were heavy and I thought that if he fell asleep I wouldn’t bother him again about the fireworks catastrophe of 1896.

He straightened up, “For the record,” he rasped, “It wasn’t me. In addition to some thinking it was that Goldstein or Goldbloom or whatever his name was, some folks said it was one of us boys, but it wasn’t. Hell, I didn’t start smoking until I was twelve.”

He looked down at the cigarette in his hand, took a drag and exhaled a thin line of smoke from chapped gray lips.

“My uncle was running for some public office, and he was over by the wagon glad-handing the natives when it went. I just happened to be looking over that way. And dammit I wish I hadn’t. My uncle, James, James Dale. He was so close to the wagon that the first explosion just . . . just obliterated him.”

He closed his eyes and whispered, “I saw pieces of him go flying as I was being thrown backward.”

He paused to catch his breath. It was a long moment, and during it, I had plenty of time to wish I hadn’t come here to put a dying man through this.

“The explosions came in intervals like a fireworks show is supposed to, you know. When it was done, that whole end of the main drag was on fire and you got to remember, there weren’t any fire trucks. Nothing like that. Folks worked to put it out, but the fire burned half of the north end of Main Street that night.”

“The wind drove it?”

He nodded. “A hellish wind out of the east. Damnedest thing you know, for the wind to be out of the east around here. And it never did rain a goddam drop. Would have helped.”

“How many were killed?” I asked, knowing the answer and feeling s******c for asking, but somehow needing to hear it from someone who was there.

“Eleven men, including my uncle and a distant cousin. There were two women in the hat shop that went. Glad I didn’t see that. They said shards of glass from those big show windows cut them to pieces. Someone said one of them was pregnant, but I don’t know. And there was a little girl of about three and a teenage boy who went that day too. They might have been brother and sister, I don’t know. One of the boys I’d been playing with, Hank Klosterman was his name, he lost an eye. And yet somehow that old boy managed to make it over to fight in the first war. I hear he died in a muddy trench in France.”

Larry belched and grimaced.

“Sometimes I think I can taste the disease in my guts when that happens,” he said.

We talked about other things for five minutes before he said he was tired. I excused myself and went around the house so as to not bump into his wife.

Depending upon who you ask, there may have been another man who died that night, a volunteer fireman whose name didn’t appear in the Toulouse newspaper, the Sentinel, which by the way, was in the building where the fire stopped. A two-foot thick firewall ended the blaze and volunteers worked throughout the night running buckets of water up a ladder to keep the roof wet so it wouldn’t ignite. Anyway, rumor has it that the owner of the Toulouse Hotel, whose family is still prominent in town today, supposedly struck a deal with this firefighter to venture into the building’s attic and retrieve a safe full of jewelry and other valuables he’d stowed up there. Some folks went so far as to say he’d stolen those items from his patrons. As the story goes, the fireman went in and never came out and as far as I know, no safe was ever found. In little towns there’s usually something to these rumors, and often the real story is much more interesting.

Larry Dale died three weeks later in his bed in the spring of 1966. My notes from that afternoon remained in the bottom drawer of my desk where I am the head librarian of the Toulouse Public Library until I too was diagnosed with cancer. I thought I’d better get to writing –I thought I’d better tell the tale of the little town of Toulouse, Missouri, population 3,961 according to the 1980 census. Toulouse is like so many other country hamlets in rural America only in that it is totally unique. Its founding is bizarre. Its history is too if you’re willing to scratch away the topsoil a bit and see what’s underneath. I’ve been compiling stories like Larry Dale’s for many years, and you hold them in your hands. And if I’ve done my job well and gotten enough dirt under my fingernails, you’re apt to find that small town life in Middle America isn’t what you thought it was, even if you live there.

Alvin straightened the pages of his manuscript and leaned back in his chair. He was feeling pretty good this day. Maybe later he would walk down to the corner store and get a pack of cigarettes and sit on the bench down by the cannon in Centennial Park. Maybe there a title would come to him.

A coughing fit overtook him and he heard Jenny holler down the stairs, “Mr. Burgmeier, are you okay?”

When it subsided, he said that he was and then he asked, “Are they here?”

He heard her descending the stairs. She poked her head around the corner and said, cupping her hand to her mouth, “Flocked in a little while ago.”

He laughed, “A murder of crows.”

“Yep,” she agreed. “Mrs. Cuthbertson asked about you; wanted to know how you were doing. I told her you were on a date with that pretty young kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Bell.”

He laughed.

“Madam Cuthbertson looked at me like I had a smart mouth.”

“I bet she did,” he said.

“Really ruffled her feathers.”

He was still laughing as she charged back up the stairs to man her post behind the heavy oak checkout desk.