1 News from Dead Mule Swamp Page 5

  “Shall I bring something?” I couldn’t believe I was offering. I had almost nothing in the house and I wasn’t even sure the diner in town was open on Sunday morning.

  “Oh, no. This time will be my treat. It used to take an hour for Jimmie Mosher to drive to my place in his old Studebaker. But I expect it won’t take you nearly so long. You don’t have an old Studebaker, do you?” She tittered a bit at her own joke.

  I chuckled too, hoping the roads were better than her time estimate suggested. “I have a Jeep.”

  “You’ll be fine, then,” she pronounced. “I’ll see you soon.”

  Chapter 15

  I slid the county map out of my desk, and compared it with Tom’s drawing. It looked to me as if I the drive didn’t need to be quite as complicated as Tom had made it appear, he had mapped out a circuitous route that saved me perhaps three miles, but took a lot of dirt roads. I stacked the printed map with Tom’s drawing, and stepped out the kitchen door. Since moving here, I had almost become comfortable with the idea of not locking my doors. Most of the folks in Cherry Hill don’t bother. But the events of the weekend had taken a toll, and I turned the key in the lock.

  School Section Road was way over in the southwest corner of the county, and Tom had suggested that to avoid going up toward the highway, I should go south on Alder from South River Road and jog around a bit to cross the Petite Sauble River where it curves back to the west, to get there. I decided to give Tom’s route a try as an exercise in getting better acquainted with the county. The route was tortured, and the roads only slightly less so, but when I reached School Section Road it was straight and level, like a teacher’s ruler. Once it dipped into Butternut Valley, however, things were altogether different. In the first place, there were no signs to tell a newcomer that this valley had a name. Then, the county map showed two roads extending south from School Section, but neither was labeled. In reality, there were three roads going left from the valley. They were all dirt roads, and none of them had road signs.

  I tried to make sense of Tom’s map. At the middle of the valley he had indicated one dirt road to the left with the name of Firebreak. One of the three roads was at what I decided was the “middle” of the valley, and another was at the bottom of the valley. The third choice was neither at the middle or the bottom, but it was clearly the best road of the three. None of them looked like a past or present firebreak.

  I tried the best road. It twisted and curved for a half mile till I reached a gate with a sign: “No Trespassing—Private Property.” There was no space to turn around, with thick scrub oaks encroaching on the road. It took longer than I expected to back up twenty-six hundred winding feet.

  My next try was the road at the middle of the valley. I decided I should just consider Tom’s map to be perfectly accurate. Since the valley was steeper on one slope than the other, the point halfway between the two hills was part way up the gentler slope. His map indicated that the next turn should be to the right in 1.2 miles. He had not given this road a name. I drove slowly through loose sand, dipping through holes that probably became swimming pools when it rained. I passed several dirt roads leading either up or down hill, watching the odometer crawl upwards. This road was straight, as a firebreak would probably be, so I was hopeful. In exactly 1.2 miles there was, indeed, another road. Not a huge surprise, given that there had been one about every two-tenths of a mile. A signboard at the corner consisted of two uprights with slats across it on which people’s names had been painted. I looked for one that might be Tom’s mother, but realized I still didn’t know her actual last name, so that was useless.

  I nosed the Jeep downhill and thought it was probably a good omen when I slipped past Pike Pike and then Bluegill Circle. I was looking for another fishy road, after all, and just seeing names on the roads was encouraging. After Walleye Trail and Sunfish Bend, there it was: Brown Trout Lane. I turned right and then left along a broad curve of the Pottawatomi River, another waterway that meanders through the county. There was one house at the end of the lane, and as a small sigh escaped my lips I realized that I’d been quite tense ever since leaving School Section Road.

  The brown board-and-batten building looked as if it has started out as a fishing cabin, but had been expanded several times. A large pole barn stood on higher ground slightly behind the house. There was a screened porch across the length of the house where it faced the river, and Brown Trout Lane ended at the side door. A small, thin woman wearing overalls and a blue-flowered shirt opened this door, waved and smiled at me. Her wispy hair was escaping from two thin braids. Although she was slight, she seemed to bristle with energy.

  I stepped out of the Jeep, and she called, “I see you found me just fine. You must be Ana Raven.” She even pronounced my name right.

  “Yes,” I answered. “There’s quite a maze of roads back here. Like a small town of its own.”

  “Mostly summer cottages,” she said. “But I stay year round. Tom brings in groceries on a sled with his snowmobile, and I don’t need to go out very much. The Harpers, back on Bluegill, spend the winters, too. They plow the road that far, and I can call them if I need help. Come on in. Please call me Cora.”

  I followed her through the porch into a kitchen that was probably updated in the 1950s. A wooden table and chairs, painted white, occupied the center floor space. A one-piece cast iron, enameled sink and drainboard filled a corner, and flowered chintz hid the pipes and whatever was stored beneath. Open shelves were neatly lined with blue paper and stacked with dishes, pans, books and knick-knacks. A round-topped refrigerator hummed in the adjacent corner. The one anomaly was a brand-new stove with a glass cooktop. Cora had been following my eyes. “Had to do it,” she said. “The old oven just up and died one day. It’s a shame. The old appliances work much better, but it’s easy to clean.”

  Every inch of the rest of the space in the room was filled with boxes. There were file cabinets, boxes of pictures, boxes of books, packing crates with faded fruit-farm labels, and boxes of what seemed to be unsorted junk. In fact, the rest of the house appeared to be stuffed with more of the same. Every item not in a box had a tag tied to it.

  Cora’s eyes were crinkling, and the left corner of her mouth twitched. “Historians know so much because we collect things,” she said. “Some just collect knowledge, but I like to have substance to my facts. The pole barn’s full too, but it’s better organized. My little museum, I guess you could call it.”

  “Amazing,” I said, shaking my head. “But if it’s a museum, why not have it in town where people can visit?”

  “Some day,” she sighed. “Some day. Now, shall we have lunch and talk about your newspaper?”

  Chapter 16

  Here was another mystery. Cora was not as old as I had imagined, probably only about twenty years my senior. And she was apparently well-educated, and spoke precisely, yet Tom’s speech was sloppy and sounded more like that of a high-school dropout. If I had not been told, I never would have guessed that they were mother and son.

  She put a kettle of water on the stove, and brought cups, spoons, teabags, sugar and milk to the table.

  “I hope I’m not interfering with your afternoon nap,” I said.

  “Nap? I don’t take naps.”

  I was surprised. “Oh, Tom implied you shouldn’t be bothered in the early afternoon because you might be sleeping.”

  “That Tom! Honestly, I took a nap one day when I had a bad cold, and now he thinks I’m practically ready for assisted living. He’s a great help to me, but sometimes he acts as if I’ve gone over the hill just because I don’t like to drive.”

  “I suspect our children always think of us as much older than we are,” I offered. “Even after they grow up. My son, Chad, is in college, and he thinks I’m a real old fogey.” Most of the time, Chad and I got along just fine, but I was searching for ways to establish rapport.

  “Maybe boys need to keep their mothers at a certain distance,” Cora said. Abruptly, she changed the sub
ject. “I have cream of chicken soup and some homemade brown bread. I hope those are acceptable for lunch. On the phone I forgot to ask you if you’d like them.”

  “That sounds great. How do you find time to bake?”

  “I only have to feed myself, for the most part. When I do cook, I make a large batch of whatever it is. I give some to Tom and freeze the rest. I like to try old recipes that come across my desk. Some are very good, others... you have to wonder. The ethnic foods are very interesting. A lot of Finns and Swedes settled here, but also Poles and Czechs, as well as those from English-speaking nations.”

  I thought she sounded like a teacher, with carefully-selected words and phrases. As she talked, Cora began to heat the soup on her new stove, and then sliced thick slabs of soft brown bread that looked delicious.

  “There are paper napkins on that shelf,” she pointed to the right of the stove. “And you can see the bowls and plates.”

  I set the table without difficulty, and we settled into the comfortable pre-meal routine known to all women who inhabit kitchens.

  Soon we sat down, and the food was as good as the aromas had promised. As we got acquainted, I was not surprised to learn that Tom was good at fixing machinery, but not too handy in the kitchen. She said she had married young and Tom was her only child. In return I told her I’d once taught literature at a community college. After eating, Cora refilled the tea kettle, and I began to tell her the story of my mysterious paper. It seemed to me to become more complicated every time I told it.

  Cora, however, was definitely a no-nonsense kind of woman. I already liked her immensely. The kettle began to whistle, and as she hopped up to turn it off and fill our cups again she said, “It’s really quite simple. There’s something so juicy in that paper that someone is willing to go to a great deal of effort to keep it hidden. Cliff must have realized that, but his death may or may not be related. Believe me, old forgotten facts can affect the present quite seriously. The important thing is to find a copy of the paper.”

  “I agree,” I said. “But Jerry Caulfield told me that no one has copies of those old editions any more. We narrowed it down to some time between 1881 and 1917. Both of those page designs are wrong, but he thinks the banner was changed once more, and he said he’d look up that date.

  Cora’s eyes were not twinkling now. “Humph. That Mr. Gerald Caulfield ought to know more about his own paper without looking it up. The man’s a disgrace to the county.”

  This hardly fit with my image of the person I’d spent a pleasant morning with, just the previous day, so I held my tongue.

  “All-new printing equipment was purchased in 1894. Surely he knows that date. It was the year his great-great-grandmother died. She left a fortune to her son, Charles, and he spent a pile of it on new presses. Enraged his wife, but it boosted Cherry Hill into prominence in the county. There had been three papers before then, but the new presses were faster and cleaner, and the Herald could get the news onto paper in record time.”

  What she said made sense, and I nodded. Before I could say anything, Cora continued. “Bought a Balzer automobile, too. I’ll bet you never heard of that! It looked like two bicycles fastened together, with a gasoline engine under a buckboard seat. He had it custom built with a cargo box on the back, and shipped it in by rail from New York. It couldn’t handle the back roads, but Charles moved papers around the main routes in the county so fast that he had news on the streets from Cherry Hill to Jalmari to Thorpe faster than the other companies could even print their papers. Gerald knows all this.”

  “If he does, then why wouldn’t he tell me?” I asked. “He seemed really interested in helping me.”

  “He’s a sneak, a snake in the grass, with his fine china and smooth talk. He’s got some hidden reason, you mark my words.”

  I tried to move the conversation back to my topic of interest, since I just couldn’t relate to this view of Jerry Caulfield. “So, you think the paper had to be printed in 1894 or later?”

  “No doubt about it. Let’s see if we can narrow it down even more. You said the school play was Twelfth Night?”

  “Yes.”

  Cora pushed herself away from the table and walked to one of the large file cabinets. As she rummaged in a drawer she muttered, “T. Theatre. Local plays... Shakespeare... Aha!”

  She pulled a brown folder from the cabinet and laid it on the table. “There have been fifty-two Shakespeare productions in the county since 1867 that I’ve been able to verify. The most often staged has been Hamlet. How’s that for an ominous past? Tragedies are so much more popular than comedies.”

  I took a breath, planning to say something snide about modern tragedies like House of Sand and Fog, but Cora continued on in her eagerness to share of her amassed knowledge.

  “Coriolanus played here only once—a traveling company from Chicago. However, Twelfth Night has been relatively well represented with four productions. In 1977, Cherry Hill High School attempted to produce a modernized version. That was an error of judgment.” Cora peered at me over her reading glasses. “I was there.”

  A tingling of anticipation prickled my skin, and I tried to urge her on with an intense look.

  “A 1952 production was staged, also by the high school. The original version. The director was Samuel Lutz, who was still directing plays when I graduated.

  “The State University Thespians brought a Shakespeare festival to town for a week in the summer of 1928. A stage was erected in the park and they presented on successive evenings, King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet.”

  “There’s one more,” I said. “Is it the one we want?”

  She read from a yellowed card,

  “’Cherry Hill High School presents a Shakespeare Comedy in Five Acts. Twelfth Night or What You Will celebrates the opening of the new school auditorium. Viola to be played by the lovely Miss Edna Heikkinen, and Sebastian by young Master Charles Caulfield, Jr.’” Cora looked at me again, and harrumphed once more. “Here we are. ‘May 7-9, 1896. Tickets $.25. All proceeds will go toward retiring the auditorium construction debt.’”

  My thoughts were racing. That was the same month as I had seen on the scrap of newspaper that had been in my bag. “Now we know when the play was given, but how can we find a newspaper?”

  “Let’s go to the barn,” Cora said.

  Chapter 17

  The pole barn was everything the house was not: organized, modern, and also chilly. Cora switched on bank after bank of fluorescent lights which buzzed and flickered as they struggled to come on in the cold building. Fortunately, she also turned on a gas-fired space heater which began throwing out warmth immediately.

  I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The inside did not look anything like a barn at all, except for Styrofoam insulating material filling the spaces between the posts. In the first place, the barn had two floors. A wide staircase leading upwards was against the wall to my right, but it led to a closed door. Directly to my left, a corner room had been partitioned off and made into an office with half walls. A computer with a twenty-three-inch, flat-screen monitor occupied the desk; there was an oversized flat-bed scanner, a color laser printer and a couple of work tables.

  The remainder of what I could see on the first floor was filled with display cases or roped-off “rooms.”

  “Cora! This is wonderful. This is already a museum. Why isn’t this in town where people can see it?”

  “Some folks have no sense,” was Cora’s cryptic answer, and she seemed to put a heavy period on the sentence, and the topic.

  I changed my tack. “You have very nice computer equipment here. My son would be impressed. He’s a junior at Tech.”

  “I may like history, but historic filing systems are inadequate. I’m working hard to transfer all the paper files to digital ones. It took me a while to learn how to set up a database, but I usually manage to accomplish things I set my mind to. I thought I’d really miss my old card system, but I can’t say that I do. I’ve kept it, of course
; it’s upstairs. But I can look up everything much faster this way. The biggest problem is it takes so long to do the data entry. I have thousands of items here, and more in the house that aren’t listed yet.”

  “I noticed.”

  “A lot of it I’ve kept catalogued in my head, but that isn’t going to help anyone else, and I won’t be able to keep this up forever. I’d love to see a foundation established, a real historical society that would preserve the local past. There could be programs for school children. There are duplicates of so many items the students could even learn to use some of the less-valuable ones—sort of a living history class every so often.”

  “What a wonderful idea. May I look around?”

  “Of course.”

  I began just beyond the office room. The first case was an old one with quarter-sawn oak edges, and a rounded glass front. It contained fossils and arrowheads, stone hatchets and wicked-looking stone knives. Some were grouped, and every group was labeled with a typed card. The card beside one batch of small arrow points read, “Clarence B. Morrow farm, found by William Morrow, aged 7, 1934.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked.

  “People generally want to tell me all they know about things when they bring them in, and I make them stay until I get it all written down. I mostly display the items that have more provenance, and keep the less-well documented things upstairs.”

  I moved on to the next case. This one was newer and seemed to have come from a department store, perhaps it had been a jewelry case. The angled shelves were perfect for displaying a mixture of old photographs and some personal items. There was also a Bible, a lace handkerchief, a shawl, some buttons and other oddments. In contrast with the soft fabrics, the bottom shelf contained a rough and broken whiffletree from a wagon. The cards came to my rescue again. “Possessions of Thaddeus T. and Alma Jorgensen, first settlers of Forest County. Whiffletree believed to be from the wagon in which they traveled here, from Pennsylvania, 1847.”