Chapter Two: Alexander tells His Side of the Story
I knew I should never have let Blossom write the first chapter. This story needs to be told, and that much is the truth, but Blossom has a tendency to exaggerate. She's basically honest, but that doesn't mean she pushes the truth too hard.
For one thing, I was never as sweet on Letty Shambaugh as she was on me. I could never let completely go of the fact that her mother had been so hard on mine. My mother has always had a keen desire to take what she considers her rightful place among the social circles of Bluff City, and Mrs. Shambaugh liked nothing better than to freeze her out. Mrs. Shambaugh is the leader of most of the women's clubs in town, and she has blackballed my mother something fierce. That's why I was always so pleased that Blossom, Uncle Miles, and my barnyard ghost had gotten my mother friendly with Mrs. Van Deeter. Mrs. Van Deeter is true aristocracy as far as Bluff City goes. She makes her own decisions and as far as Mrs. Shambaugh goes, Mrs. Van Deeter has never let Mrs. Shambaugh buffalo her, so my ma did have some friends that she could depend on after that.
Another thing about Letty that always stuck in my craw was the fact that she was so keen on showing off the Shambaugh money. Granted, they have plenty, but the fact that the Select Dry Goods Company had made Letty so rich was none of her doing. My folks are well to do as far as Bluff City goes, but I knew that was because of my dad's hard work. I knew it because he never let me rest on his laurels. He had me helping out from the time I could walk, and believe me I got the message. My dad had earned everything he got, and I wasn't about to forget it, never mind lord it over anyone else. Blossom never did have much, but she made up for her lack of monetary advantages with a keen mind and a good heart. That goes a lot farther than anyone's money.
For a long time, I did want to keep it under wraps that I had the power to reach the other side. It doesn't do to be different at that age, and even though Blossom was willing to present herself for what she was, I was still a little leery of the whole situation. By the time I'd seen a couple of spirits, though, I had to concede that Blossom and I were connected by fate, and you don't mess with fate. At times it didn't seem fair. I wanted to sow my wild oats like everyone else, but I finally conceded that I had to keep myself together for what lay ahead.
It was easy enough at first. Through the end of our freshman year, we concentrated on our schoolwork. Thanks to Blossom I had top grades for the first time in my life. That summer and into the fall, between me helping my dad and Blossom working for Mr. Franklin and helping her ma tend their garden, we didn't see each other much. It couldn't be helped. My dad had always been against me joining up with him at work, but he began to see that I was getting a good head on my shoulders for dealing with clients and handling the crews out on the construction sites. I'd always favored my dad more than my mother. Blossom is an independent sort, and it did her good to be making some money of her own, although she's always had a knack for coming up with a little extra cash when it was needed. Things weren't that different for us at first. It was our sophomore year that things started to change between us.
Bluff City had grown up, too. It was more like a real city now and not as much like a small town. Folks were moving into all the houses my father had built as fast as he could build them, and more stores had come in as well. Blossom and I had always sworn the first thing we'd do when we grew up was get away from Bluff City, but we didn't talk about that any more. It was home, and we were learning to appreciate it. We loved walking through town and knowing about everything that was going on around us.
Blossom and I liked looking in the windows of all the stores when we got the chance. I liked the pawnshop, with its big golden balls hanging over the door. I liked the way they swayed when the wind blew, and how you'd see something different there every day. I liked going to the cigar store for my dad. There was a wooden Indian outside the door, and all the little kids called him Apache. His loincloth and war bonnet were hand painted, and the cigar maker carried Apache inside whenever it rained so the paint wouldn't get soaked and flake off. Many's the time I've helped him.
Blossom liked to go into the shop that sold coffee and tea and spices. Mrs. Culp had done a good business reading tea leaves at one time. Business had slacked off, and Blossom didn't need to buy much tea anymore, but I think it reminded her of past times. Blossom knew without even looking at the labels what tea was Formosa, and which one was Oolong, and which one was Orange Pekoe. She liked to breathe in the smell of the coffee beans, and cinnamon and vanilla.
We were looking in the window once, and ran into Mrs. Van Deeter coming out of the shop. She gave us a ride home in her Cadillac. She seemed very pleased to see us together, and after a lively conversation with Blossom about different types of tea, we wound up being invited to come to her house for a tea party the next day. Blossom and Mrs. Van Deeter got to be quite good friends, which pleased my mother no end. Mrs. Van Deeter is probably the richest woman in town, but she gets bored easily, and since Blossom and I were responsible for a great deal of the novelty in Bluff City, she was always amused by us. The idea of us being a duo seemed to give her hope for more interesting times, and I must say we did fulfill her wishes in that respect.
There was a scandal when a store went up on Hope Street that put ladies underthings on display in the window. They weren't corsets and petticoats, either. They had lace panties, and brassieres trimmed in ribbon. The seventh and eighth grade boys like to wore the sidewalk in front of the place out, pointing and giggling like little girls.
I walked by there once with Blossom and whispered in her ear, "That what you want for Christmas?"
She shrugged. "If that's what you want to buy. Get a size twenty-four waist, and thirty-two bust, Alexander, but let me know when you're going in. I want to sell tickets to that, too. I could probably make more money at that than I made showing people through your ghost barn a few years back. I'm sure I could get Lucille to come on down to see you if nothing else."
I knew she'd do it, too.
"Forget it, Blossom. Just forget it. I'd rather squat with spurs on than have Lucille see me buying you black lace drawers."
The town had changed a lot, but our class of 1918 had changed, too, that year. We were all mighty restless. The boys, except for Collis Ledbetter, who was the smallest kid in the class of either sex and much babied by his mama, had traded our knicker suits in for long pants, and had begun to hang out at the billiard parlor in town by the Abraham Lincoln Hotel. The girls had begun to talk about which boys were good prospects and which weren't, and had put their skirts down and their hair up. This did not entirely please me, as Blossom's legs had just started to fill out, and I had just started to enjoy seeing them. Still I was glad that thanks to Mr. Franklin, she was able to have a few nice things to wear. She deserved them.
Letty Shambaugh was apparently still seeing Les Dawson on the side. Blossom said that when they came to the picture show, Letty always gave her a mean look. We used to speculate on what Mrs. Shambaugh would finally say when she caught them out on the town. Mrs. Shambaugh had never considered Les Dawson a good prospect, and likely never would. Letty was skating on thin ice, and Blossom and I were just human enough to want to be there when it finally broke.
Everyone in the high school had finally accepted Blossom and me as a couple, although Nola Nirider still looked at me once in awhile like she'd like to grab onto me if she got half a chance. Her parents own the notions store where most of the kids stop for penny candy on their way home from school, so she is fairly well off. I wasn't about to throw Blossom over for Nola, though. That die had already been cast.
That's how it is in a small town. You notice a girl, for whatever reason or other, and she notices you. You start walking her home, maybe because you like her, or maybe just because she lives your way. As you start to grow up, you start to go places together. People expect to see you together, so no other fellers get a notion to take her out. Everyone thinks she's your girl, and if you get along, and have fun together, you don't mind. That's the way it is, and usually it works out all right. There's a kind of affectionate contentment in your being together. Then after awhile it heats up and you wind up together for good. Sophomore year things started heating up between me and Blossom Culp.
We still did our schoolwork together. We had it down to a system by then, and we still used to talk about school over breakfast at least three or four times a week. My folks knew durned well if it wasn't for Blossom, they'd have no idea what was going on at the high school, and they were grateful to her for that.
We read "Romeo and Juliet" and did poetry by the Brownings, and read "The Man Without A Country" which was a durned sight easier to understand than "Romeo and Juliet". I could figure out that Nolan feller's reasoning, sorry though it was, a lot better than I could understand Shakespeare. I thought that Edward Everett Hale was a first class writer.
We studied chemistry, and I have to admit, I never would have memorized the Periodic Table without Blossom's coaching. I could understand chlorine being Cl, and calcium being Ca, but why gold had to be Au, or silver had to be Ag never made sense to me. I was never interested in Latin.
In history class, we were supposed to get all the way through the Revolutionary War by the end of the year, and I was looking forward to finally reaching the Civil War the following year. Our football team also beat the Bloomington Bulldogs that year, and as they were our biggest rivals, that was grand thing. Bloomington was a bigger town, and thought of us as hicks. Being beaten by a bunch of folks they considered rubes stuck in their craw.
Blossom had just turned fifteen that February, and I wasn't going to be sixteen until July, so some of what happened between us was a gradual thing. I couldn't have rushed things in the romance department if I'd wanted to. What I didn't know about women would fill a book. But I'd given her a silver plated dresser set for Christmas, with a hand mirror, brush and comb, which meant her hair was looking better, and a box of chocolates from Nirider's for her Valentine's day birthday. I had no doubt her mama had gotten into the chocolates the minute Blossom's back was turned, but it didn't matter. Mrs. Culp was welcome to them, as far as I was concerned. Anything I could do to get in good with her, I'd do. She was getting more used to me, but she was frightening in a way. I never knew what she was thinking. She has second sight, too, and is a fair hand with a crystal ball and card reading, besides the tea leaves.
I tried to be nice to her. My father used to get gifts from some of his suppliers at Christmas time, and that year it had been a popular thing to send fruit baskets. When the fifth one arrived, my mother was appalled.
"What are we going to do with all of this?" she asked, dramatically.
"I could take one over to the Culps," I offered. "Mrs. Culp might like that." My mother agreed. I carried a nice big basket over to their house, and found Blossom and her mother sitting at the kitchen table. Mrs. Culp eyed the basket suspiciously.
"What's that?"
"Just a little Christmas gift," I said, setting the basket down carefully on the table.
She reached out and grabbed a big, shiny, red apple.
"Kid, you're all right," she said, starting to cut it up into pieces small enough to manage with her false teeth. That was better than other things she'd said about me over the years, and I was pleased. Blossom looked pleased as well. That earned me a kiss when she showed me out that was quite memorable.
After Blossom's birthday, though, when I kissed her, the kisses were a lot longer and deeper than they'd ever been before, and that made it all worthwhile. That girl could surely kiss.
It made me wonder. "Blossom, where did you ever learn to kiss like that?" I asked her once, as we stood behind the barn, catching our breath after a good long round of spooning.
Being a psychic and sensitive to other worlds, she'd once done a bit of time travel. I had, too, but she'd done some of it without me, which always made me curious. She had gone and given her spelling bee medal to a boy she'd met in the future, and I always did wonder a bit what had gone on there. Mostly because she wouldn't talk about it, and she'll usually tell me anything.
"I learned it from you, Alexander. When you kiss me, it just seems to come natural."
I was pleased, but before I could let myself get too puffed up, I asked her flat out, "Have you ever kissed another boy?"
She got a distant look on her face. "Just once."
"Do I know him?"
"You know that you don't."
"It was Jeremy, wasn't it?" That was the boy she'd gone through time to help at Halloween our freshman year. "Dad-rat it, Blossom Culp, I knew it!"
"What difference does it make? I'll never see him again. You're being jealous of a ghost, Alexander. Did I act like this when you were up in the barnloft with the ghost of Inez Dumaine?"
"Inez was different," I argued. "She was dead! Jeremy isn't dead…he's just not alive yet. The way the world is going, who knows what they'll be getting up to in the future! And you were gone all night! What was I supposed to think?"
She glared at me, her black eyes shining like onyx. "Do you really believe that, Alexander Armsworth? Because you ought to know better. It's not the same. Nothing is ever the same with me and anybody else as it is with you."
"Well, I hope not," I answered her, and I slid my arm around her waist. She stood stiff for a moment, but then let me hold her, and we commenced kissing again. Besides our spot behind the barn, we went to all of the places the kids used to go courting in those days. The football stadium was a good place to go at night, and once in awhile my father would let me take out the Mercer. Blossom and I would drive to Hickory Lane, which was a dead end street on the hill just outside of town that was popular with petting couples. Dad favored our new Ford, but he kept the Mercer out of sentiment, and I knew if I played my cards right, and stayed in my dad's good books, it would be mine eventually, and Blossom along with it.
I was clumsy at first, but I soon figured out the right way to run my hand over the tucks in her starchy shirtwaists so that she would lean in instead of pulling away. Why they put so many durned buttons on those things, I'll never know. The first time I tried to undo one, it had seventeen, but when I got to the ribbons on her corset cover a few dates later they were a lot easier. Blossom Culp soon had me tied in different kinds of knots.
The whole world was in a knot that year. The June of our sophomore year, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, I think it was, had been assassinated and in July, right after my birthday, Austro-Hungary had declared war on Serbia. Russia had joined up with Serbia, and Germany had declared war on France and Russia in August, and started marching across Belgium. Europe as a whole was one big mess.
Most folks in Bluff City were like the rest of the country, and wanted no part of the whole thing. President Wilson was doing his best to keep us out of it, although many people suspected that, like Miss Dabney before him, he had a soft spot for the British. We had been getting regular letters from Mrs. Birdsall, formerly Miss Dabney, but now they tended to be rather erratic. Blossom and I missed those letters and hoped she was doing all right. The last letter we had gotten had mentioned the war.
Apparently, the king was quite depressed over the casualty lists and had taken to visiting the soldiers quite regularly. He'd gone to review some of the troops in October and gotten a skittish horse, which threw him off and busted his pelvis, which couldn't have made being a war-time king any easier. He was also feeling pretty sorry for the Princess Vicky, who was married to the Kaiser, and stuck right in the middle of everyone's bad feelings. I felt sorry for her myself. It didn't sound like the Kaiser was any great prize. Queen Mary seemed to be handling things all right, though, and was spending her time visiting the hospitals and organizing relief efforts.
The Queen had even teamed up with Mary MacArthur for the common good, which was a wonder to our friend, Mrs. Birdsall, being that the MacArthur woman was somewhat of a radical, and not the sort of person you'd expect to be taking tea with the Queen. She knew how to organize things, though, and it seemed that a heap of organizing was necessary to keep Britain running through the war. From what Mrs. Birdsall wrote I got the impression that Mary MacArthur would have probably gotten on with Blossom like a house afire.
Blossom didn't like to talk about the war. Every time she did she got visions of barbed wire, bloody trenches and poison gas, and it scared her spitless. We talked about the war a lot at my fraternity meetings, though, over cigars and beer.
Wendell Burdick was a senior, and couldn't wait for war to be declared, so he could go off and become a big war hero. "If war's declared, I'll enlist the next day. After what them Germans did to those Belgians, who wouldn't?"
"You can talk," Monroe Puckett snarled. "They wouldn't take you if you tried. You can't see worth a darned. Who's gonna want someone with glasses as thick as pop bottles in the war?"
Orville Tweedy shook his head. "As long as Wilson's president, he'll keep us out of it. We're getting along fine. Let them folks fight their own wars without dragging us into it."
"Oh, go on!" Wendell said sharply. "Wilson's just an old time school teacher. I don't know what the suffragettes are whining about. A woman's running the country now. Wilson don't go to the privy unless his missus says it's okay." He looked at his beer bottle solemnly. "And what about this? Next thing you know the country will be dry. They're already talking about it. It don't seem right. A man who works hard has got a right to his beer!"
"When did you ever work hard?" Orville answered, and we all laughed, but I wondered. I didn't care that much for beer, and I only smoked a cigar when I was with the other fellas, but I sure didn't want to go off to France to get shot at. I thanked the Lord that I was no where near through school. I was hoping hard the whole thing would be over before I had a chance to get myself drawn into it.
The ice broke on Letty Shambaugh right before school began in the fall of 1916 right as we was starting our junior year at the high school. Mrs. Shambaugh caught Les and Letty in the gazebo behind the Shambaugh's house, and from what we heard it had been in a very compromising position. Les hadn't been the only one in that couple who'd had hands where they didn't belong, so Letty's mother couldn't even complain about it being all Les Dawson's fault.
According to the other girls at school, Letty had sworn it was true love, and had quoted a lot of the Romeo and Juliet from Miss Blankenship's last year's English class to make her point. It all ended with Letty being the first girl in our class to get engaged. Les gave her a diamond ring, and joined the Army, just to prove to Mrs. Shambaugh that he was a changed man and that he was going to make something of himself. The war couldn't come soon enough for Mrs. Shambaugh.
Les went off to basic training, and Letty waved her ring around until we all got mighty tired of it. Frankly, I didn't think much of Les Dawson's chances. The way our ships were getting sunk, I knew we'd have to go over there and lick someone eventually, and he didn't have the sense to come in out of the rain, much less a shower of bullets. I was curious to see if he'd do better than anyone expected or not. Sometimes a man is like a watermelon. It takes a thumping to tell whether he's any good or not.
Blossom and I had a showdown of our own not long after. It was all due to "Intolerance"…the one at the picture show and the nature of my sister. Blossom had a night off, and we had decided to go and see the picture, not knowing we'd be seeing Lucille as well. We'd watched "Birth of a Nation" not long before, and knew anything D.W. Griffith put his mind to was bound to be a spectacle. The plot was kind of convoluted, and somewhere between a Babylonian sequence, and a romantic scene between Mae Marsh and Robert Harron, I got to kissing Blossom in the flickering light. The problem was, my sister and her husband were sitting a couple of rows behind us, and since my folks were babysitting their son, Lowell, Jr., they got dragged into it as well.
Lucille and Lowell, Sr. has apparently spent more time watching Blossom and me than watching the picture, in spite of the fact that it was a thirteen reeler, and they already knew durned well what Blossom and I looked like. At least Lucille had. My brother-in-law is a gentleman to a fault, and has a soft spot for Blossom. I can't believe he would have come poking into out business on his own, but then, only cows know why they stampede.
Not having noticed this, I walked Blossom home, and then headed home myself. My mother and Lucille were waiting to pounce. My dad was sitting in his favorite chair with Lowell opposite him, looking uncomfortable, the way he always does when my mother goes off on one of her tangents with Lucille.
"Well, Alexander Miles Armsworth! I am surprised at you!" My mother began.
"What did I do?"
Lucille looked at me mournfully. "Honestly, Mother, he looked like one of those octopus things that we had in our biology book back in freshman year at the high school. Of course Blossom probably doesn't know any better. The poor thing hasn't had a traditional upbringing, but honestly, Alexander! You should know better than to be slobbering all over a girl in public. If you're going to go out with Blossom, you should at least treat her like a lady."
"Now, Sugar," Lowell interjected, "he wasn't exactly treating her like a man."
"Let's hope not," said my father, amused. He's always liked Lowell's directness. "And Lucille, honey, Alexander and Blossom have been sweet on each other for a long time. I'd be more surprised if he hadn't gotten a kiss out of her yet."
"Joseph Armsworth!" My mother exclaimed. "I will not have our son sowing his wild oats in public! It's unseemly."
"Well, Lucille, you should have taken a picture. It would have lasted longer." I said, my temper rising. I was just thanking my lucky stars Lucille had caught me at the moving picture show and not in Hickory Lane.
I looked at my mother. "I could always go see if the Shambaugh's gazebo is vacant." That shut them all up, and I continued. "I like Blossom and she likes me. We go around steady, and we have for quite some time. I haven't done a durned thing with her that I need to be ashamed of, so I'll thank you to mind your own beeswax, Lucille."
"I don't know why I even bother," Mother said in a huffy voice, and she went with Lucille to get Junior so the Seaforths could go home.
I went and sat out on the front porch, and my dad joined me. He slowly unwrapped a cigar.
"Alexander," Dad said carefully, "your mother means well. She just can't see that you're already sixteen. She thinks you're just sixteen, and there's a world of difference. I know that well. I am going to trust you to keep your head, though, and if I ever think I can't trust you, then I'll certainly trust Blossom. That's a girl who knows what's right. She's poor, but proud, and smart as a whip. I worried about you more when I thought you were heading in another direction, to be honest. If you and Blossom are serious about each other, then I'll help you get settled if I can, but I want you to give me your solemn promise that you'll finish high school before you start making any serious decisions about family."
"We haven't even discussed it," I said, blushing up to the tips of my ears.
"Well, if you haven't you should, or at least be thinking about it. There's a war coming, most likely, and people tend to do strange things in strange times."
Blossom came for breakfast as usual the next morning, but no one said a word about what had gone on the night before. A young girl had gone missing from a farm just outside of town, and the newspapers were all full of it. No one knew if she'd run off somewheres, gotten lost or been kidnapped, but it was causing a lot of speculation. Another girl in her early teens had gone missing the same way on the Missouri side of the river not long before that, it had people wondering if some kind of lunatic was on the loose.
I told Blossom all about how Lucille had been spying on us at the picture show as we walked to school, though.
She looked thoughtful. "Alexander, I don't know what's right. I only feel, and if the feeling is strong enough, then I say I know. And the feeling I get with you is pretty strong. You feel right. You always have, but I'm not worried about whether or not it's forever. Forever seems awfully far away right now."
All of the girls at school were talking about the missing girls. Maisie Markham was saying how she wouldn't walk anywhere alone at night until the case was settled. Maisie is on the heavy side, and I couldn't imagine anyone trying to cart her off, but I kept mum. If they did, they certainly wouldn't have gotten far. Nonetheless, I started taking Blossom home from her job at night. If I couldn't get the Mercer, I walked, but I didn't let her out of my sight, unless she was in her ticket booth, the high school or in her house. As it turned out that in her house was not a safe place to be.
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