or he’d have stared at the sky until he drowned.
‘What happened,’ Bandy Wicker went on, ‘was that the mayor of Odessa, Texas, touched a match to the fuse of the rocket held in place by the length of sewer pipe, and a whole passel of people prepared to ooooh and aaaah at Old Glory lighting up the night-time sky for a guaranteed thirty seconds.
‘People waited and waited, and the mayor walked back and made sure the fuse of the rocket in the upright sewer pipe was burning. We all gathered around the rocket when it appeared that the fuse had burned itself both out and off. No one studied the problem more closely than Cousin Verdell, who was leaning directly over top of the rocket and peering down at goodness knows what.
‘It was about this time the rocket decided to fire itself off, an unfortunate occurrence because Cousin Verdell was still standing directly above the rocket, as if it had some mystical significance. The rocket, filled with Old Glory, including forty-eight silver stars, one for each state, terminated Cousin Verdell, instantly.
‘While there was a certain degree of tragedy involved in Cousin Verdell’s being called to his reward, it was agreed that he had lived longer than anyone that dumb had a right to.’
My daddy would always top Bandy Wicker’s fireworks stories with his baseball stories. My daddy had a million baseball stories. ‘Folks around Doreen Beach,’ he’d start off, ‘were not noted for their baseball prowess. For several years there were only eight men in the Doreen Beach district who could play any kind of baseball. To show the lengths folks around Doreen Beach would go to to field a team, one Sunday when there had been a Holy Roller church service at Doreen Beach Community Hall, the ballplayers hid Brother Bickerstaff’s horse until he agreed to be their ninth player, while on another occasion a group of men rode over to Loretta Cake’s cabin, where she lives with about a hundred cats, with the intention of convincing her to stand in right field as the ninth body on the Doreen Beach White Sox baseball team.’
Loretta Cake, who was at best considered eccentric and at worst somewhat mad, confided to Mama on one of the infrequent occasions when she dropped by our house leading eight square-jawed tom cats on leashes and dressed to resemble a middle-aged Englishwoman playing Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, that she harbored secret rape fantasies, a confession that embarrassed my mama no end, and, Loretta Cake went on, she felt that her secret fantasies were about to be fulfilled when she peeked out her window of a Sunday morning and saw several young men on horseback, wearing mackinaws and slouch hats, resembling for all the world the Dalton gang.
I thought Loretta Cake’s confession to be somewhat humorous, hearing it scrunched up in my favorite listening place between the wood box and the cook stove, as I didn’t understand the implications, rape not being a dinner-table topic of conversation in our household, or any household in the Six Towns Area, except possibly that of Loretta Cake and her cats.
The reason I didn’t understand the implication was because, the summer before, one of the Osbaldson boys from around New Oslo had planted five acres of rape, which grew the most beautiful yellow color I had ever seen, looking for all the world like a five-acre canary squatting in the midst of the Osbaldson boys’ green grazing land.
I thought Loretta Cake’s rape fantasies humorous on two levels, one being that Loretta Cake, even if she did go around dressed like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, should have secret fantasies about a field of yellow grain; and two, that Loretta Cake’s secret fantasies about a field of yellow grain should embarrass my mama.
I did not have the sense to keep my mouth shut, so of a Sunday morning on our way to a Sports Day and Picnic at New Oslo, as we were passing by the Osbaldson boys’ five-acre-canary-sized field I suggested I pick a bouquet of the rape to present to Loretta Cake when she appeared at the New Oslo Sports Day and Picnic.
Across the buggy seat, Mama and Daddy exchanged some of the strangest looks I ever saw them exchange in their entire life together, before Daddy explained to me that the word rape had more than one meaning. By the time he finished I wasn’t sure exactly what the other meaning was, except that I had no call to know of it until I was at least twenty-one and living on my own.
My wanting to take a bouquet of rape to Loretta Cake found its way into letters to Mama and Daddy’s relatives in Montana, South Carolina, and South Dakota, and the ears of the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, which was the same as broadcasting the story on CJCA in Edmonton, the radio station most available in the Six Towns Area to those of us who owned radios.
The story passed through the crowd at the New Oslo Sports Day and Picnic even quicker than pinkeye, and I got my hair rumpled and my cheek tweaked for most of the afternoon and evening, though no one ever mentioned to Loretta Cake, who was there, big as life and twice as ugly, Daddy said, why everyone was rumpling Jamie O’Day’s hair and tweaking Jamie O’Day’s cheek, for a secret is a secret, and Loretta Cake’s secret rape fantasies were safe with everyone in the Six Towns Area.
Even though the proposition by the Doreen Beach White Sox did not match her secret fantasy, Loretta Cake agreed to accompany the Doreen Beach baseball club and to sit behind the saddle of the handsomest ballplayer, who, she said, bore a startling resemblance to the outlaw Wade Dalton. Just as she was mounting the horse it stepped on the tail of one of her cats, and the screech the cat set off made the handsomest ballplayer’s horse rear and throw Loretta Cake onto her posterior and the handsomest ballplayer onto his neck, both on the ground.
The handsomest ballplayer, who bore a striking resemblance to the outlaw Wade Dalton, was a Kortgaard, one of Lousy Louise Kortgaard’s big brothers, and he lay unconscious for some time before being carried to the ball field draped over the back of his horse, while Loretta Cake, cuddling one of her cats, sat in the saddle. His teammates propped the unconscious Kortgaard up on a stack of blankets at third base and began the first game of the tournament against an all-Indian team from the reserve at Lac Ste. Anne.
However, after there was only one out and two runs in, the umpire visited third base, waved his mask and then his cap and then his bare hand in front of the unconscious Kortgaard’s face and, getting no reaction, declared the unconscious Kortgaard ineligible and suggested that someone should send a message to Curly McClintock over at New Oslo to head for Doreen Beach and cart the unconscious Kortgaard to the hospital, forty miles away in Stony Plain. Even with Loretta Cake and her cat in right field, the Doreen Beach White Sox had only eight players and were required to forfeit the game, thus cutting short Loretta Cake’s career as a right fielder.
On the Saturday before the Sunday when the Fourth of July celebrations were to be held at Doreen Beach, Daddy and I accompanied Curly and Truckbox Al McClintock to Edmonton in Curly’s inherited dump truck in order to pick up the fireworks from Mr. Prosserstein at the Acme Novelty and Carnival Supplies store. The cab of the dump truck smelled of grease and exhaust fumes, and the four of us sat ankle-deep in mufflers, crankshaft parts, and expired plugs, points, and condensers. Curly McClintock, who was slow moving and slow thinking, and who, Daddy said, was built so close to the ground his knuckles dragged, had created a son in his own image, except that Truckbox Al’s facial features resembled his mama, the youngest and most bulldog-faced Gordonjensen girl. My own daddy in his bib-overalls, black mackinaw sweater my mama had knitted him, and tweed cap, certainly appeared large to me, though my daddy preferred burly to describe his physical build.
The Acme Novelty and Carnival Supplies store was exactly as I had imagined heaven, full to the eyeballs, as Daddy put it, of every geegaw known to man and a few that weren’t. There were fake false teeth that wound up with a key and chattered when set on a table; a whole section with nothing but stuffed toys, another with nothing but box games, and a jewelry section with genuine diamond rings for as little as five dollars each.
I was allowed to carry one of the two boxes of fireworks to the truck, and while the box was large and had the
