Stories of Four Decades

By Glenn Meeter

A number of the stories in Glenn Meeters Stories of Four Decades have been reprinted (most frequently Hard Row and A Harvest), but they all made their first appearance in publications as diverse as The Atlantic Monthly, Redbook, Epoch, The Literary Review, and The Reformed Journal.

Each story has its own individual appeal. Each has its own style, theme, mood, its own plot and setting, and its own cast of characters who come fully to life only within its boundaries. Even Peter Heitz, in "The Oppressor," has different problems and preoccupations from the slightly older character with the same name in "The Convert."

But set with others in a collection that touches major points in lifestories of Youth followed by those of Marriage and Parenthood and finally New Journeyseach story takes on new dimensions. Together they form a tableau of life in the American Midwest (and California, a mid-century Mecca for Midwesterners) from the forties through the seventies. One thinks of the slow clank clank of tire chains on smalltown winter streets in the first story; the visitors to Grandmothers house paying Chicago tolls in the last; and, in between, Los Angeles freeways and South Dakota gravel roads.

Another dimension is as ancient as Joseph in Egypt: the clash of rural and village culture with urban modernity. Some characters need to break away from the village culture (faith, family, community); some lose it and re-create it. Some seek it out. All need to re-interpret it. And all struggle to maintain and pass on some aspects of that culture, if only the awed thankfulness of the traveler in A Harvest, who exclaims about his own journey, but my God what a delight, just to travel through!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9781449005931

Glenn Meeter

Born in 1934 in Hammond, Indiana, GLENN MEETER graduated from Calvin College in 1955 and married Marlene Meyerink of Platte, South Dakota, that same year before earning his masters degree at Vanderbilt University. From 1956 1960 he taught English at Illiana Christian High School in Lansing, Illinois, where his and Marlenes first daughter was born, and sold his first short story, The Son-in-Law, which paid for the birth of their second daughter. In 1960-1964 the family moved to Iowa City, where Glenn worked on his doctorate. From 1964-1969 they lived in Los Angeles, where a son and a third daughter were born, while Glenn taught at U.S.C. and wrote The Convert, Dont You Remember Me?, A Harvest, and Waiting for Daddy. Since 1969 the family has lived in DeKalb, Illinois, where Glenn wrote the Opressor, suggested by their life in Los Angeles; Hard Row, inspired by childhood memories wakened by his oldest daughters de-tasseling corn in DeKalb County fields; and Infidelity, from speculation suggested by his second daughters dance lessons in Chicago. In 1981 Sunday and Grandmothers House, based on Illinois memories from the forties and the seventies, appeared in his novel Letters to Barbara. Glenn retired as Professor of English from Northern Illinois University, where he served as English Department Chair 1984-1990, in 1998. In 1995, he published Pastorale, based on early childhood memories and inspired, no doubt, by the lives of his young grandchildren. Most recently he wrote, for this collection, Starting from Dakota, a story that goes back, although it is set in 1960, to the 1955 wedding that marked the beginning of both his family and, in the Son-in-Law, his writing career.

Book preview

STORIES

OF BY GLENN MEETER

FOUR DECADES

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

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© 2009 Glenn Meeter. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 10/6/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4490-0593-1 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-0591-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-0592-4 (hc)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Acknowledgements

Pastorale

Hard Row

Sunday

Don’t You Remember Me?

Starting from Dakota

The Son-in-Law

Waiting for Daddy

The Oppressor

The Convert

A Harvest

Infidelity

Grandmother’s House

For

Nathan Meeter

Naomi Owens

Clara and Lucas Maki

and

Nikki, Alyssa, and Tressa Cox

with

many thanks and best wishes always

Acknowledgements 

The four decades of this collection’s title refer to the 1940s through the 1970s, the decades of the main characters’ ventures, adventures, and misadventures. They might also refer to the years between 1958 and 1995, the publication dates of all the stories but the newly minted Starting from Dakota—a fact that reminds me to thank the editors and publishers who oversaw the earlier appearances of the following stories: The Son-in-Law was published in The Atlantic Monthly, August 1958. Pastorale was published in The Literary Review (Winter 1995, Vol. 38 No. 2). A Harvest appeared first in Epoch, Fall, 1968, and has been reprinted in Innovative Fiction, ed. Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer (1972) and Experimentelle amerikanische Prosa, ed. Brigitte Scheer-Schäzler (1977). Most recently it has appeared in Not Normal, Illinois, ed. Michael Martone (2009). Don’t You Remember Me? (Spring 1968) and The Oppressor (Winter 1971) appeared in South Dakota Review. Don’t You Remember Me? was reprinted in Faith and Fiction, ed. Robert Detweiler and Glenn Meeter (1979). Sunday and Grandmother’s House were introductory chapters in Letters to Barbara, a Novel by Glenn Meeter, 1981. Sunday (August 1981) and The Convert (November 1967) were published in The Reformed Journal. Waiting for Daddy (November 1969), Hard Row (July 1972), and Infidelity (January 1977) were published in Redbook. Hard Row was reprinted in Redbook’s Famous Fiction, ed. Anne Mollegen Smith (1977), and several textbook anthologies including Touchstones: Within Us, ed. Henry J. Baron, Bruce Hekman, and Daniel Vander Ark (1973) and Quaternion, ed. James M. Mellard (1978).

I also owe a great debt of thanks to all those friends and relatives (including some innocent children) who may find shadowy reflections of themselves flickering through these stories. My apologies to them, and still more to the greater number for whose fascinating and often heroic lives I was unable to find the right story.

Give what you have,

You’re worthy to live.

—favorite Dutch proverb of Anthony Meeter (1879-1960)

Pastorale 

Across the street from my living room window and front porch, Vernon’s house takes up two lots, as wide as Johnny and Janet’s house and my house together. It is shingled in dark brown. A W of white wood monograms the north wall above the cedar bushes: not a W to me, since I am not yet in school, only two wooden arrowheads or a Sunday-school-paper crown. The house has two driveways, a long one going back to the garage and another curving splendidly in front. In my imagination I drive tricycles, wagons, and electric trains over and over down the connected gravel furrows of these two drives.

Vernon is the biggest kid and has the biggest house. I am the smallest and have the smallest house. In between are Johnny and Janet, next door, eight and seven, and then Beverly, who is six. Ours is the Dutch side of the street, except for Mrs. Bosh, our neighbor with the apple tree. Vernon’s is the German side, except for old man Vermeulen who keeps chickens and geese. I have learned this from hearing my father explain to a neighbor why he is glad Joe Louis beat Max Schmeling, the German boxer, the last time they fought.

Between my house and Vernon’s is the width of the asphalt street, two front lawns, and two sidewalks. I must cross this distance to get my wagon. It is in Vernon’s yard—in his back yard, in front of the garage. I can hardly see it from my porch.

A robin hop-hop-hops on our lawn looking for worms in the mud and half-dead grass but my mother isn’t interested now. I must learn not to let Vernon take my things.

You come with me, I say. In the winter she came with me to get my sled. Later she came with me to get my trike.

This time you go by yourself, she says. You’ve got to learn not to let him take your things.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I say.

I’ll be watching from the window. Go on. She zips up my jacket.

The street is quiet. I look both ways. No car, no delivery truck, no horse-drawn wagon, no bicycle. In Vernon’s yard with the cedars and white W and the circular drive I turn around to look but I cannot see my mother in the window. It is all curtains. I walk deeper into Vernon’s yard: his side windows too are all curtains. In the back it is silent, a cool breeze rattles empty milk bottles. Empty panes of glass in the closed back porch stare at me. I seize the wagon’s cold handle. A red metal wagon, rusty, it makes a loud rattle when I pull it, louder and louder until I reach my side of the street. I have no confidence it is my wagon until I am in my own driveway, until I have it out of sight in the back.

My mother is in the kitchen. There now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

They weren’t at home, I tell her.

Gordon is peeing in the street! A collective gasp from Johnny and Janet and Beverly: after all the teasing taunting tempting encouraging and reassuring it seems they never thought I would do it.

But it’s only the grassy strip between sidewalk and asphalt where the young elm grows, with its trunk as thick as my father’s leg and whitewashed higher than my head to keep the ants away. I’m only watering the tree that my father waters with thick slopping streams from the hose, much thicker than this thin silver arc of mine that sends them all scattering now, shouting their shock and triumph and, I hope, admiration.

Gordon, supper! My mother’s voice from the front door. The big kids joyously hooting gallop away and I am left alone with my fading tinkle, all the sudden bright release of it gone, in the fading April twilight.

What on earth?! On the porch she bends to zip me up, so brusquely I rise on my toes. I resent again the shorts she makes me wear although I have explained that big kids wear pants. What were you thinking of?

They made me do it, I say.

Her hand on my head she ushers me past the open door with its oval window, taller than I, and backed by lace that I could walk through if it weren’t for the glass, into the living room. She tilts my face upward, her blue eyes suddenly fierce. Was Vernon out there?

Vernon? I turn to look past the green lawn and whitewashed elm to the brown house with its double arrows. I shake my head. No. No!

Well that’s one saving grace, she says, letting me go, and I follow her into the kitchen.

In bloom, Mrs. Bosh’s apple tree is a flower as big as a house, a global field of flowers, a magnanimity embarrassing to the street’s frugal borders of tulips, petunias, iris, gladioli, and phlox. Money doesn’t grow on trees but flowers do. The tree spills petals unconcerned across our driveway, wastes its sweetness on the wind, and when I walk under the apple boughs which in some places sweep the grass I enter a humming chamber of silk and spice. The sun shows whitely through.

I break off a twig hung with petals. It is for my mother. I lay it near the trunk and pull off another twig, and another, a branch as thick as my finger. I go around the tree pulling off the choicest flower twigs and laying them in a woody bouquet near the trunk. Janet and Beverly made May baskets for their mothers in school. Johnny also did it and told me my mother would be the only one without flowers on Mother’s Day.

Bees do not sting, my mother has told me, if you leave them alone and if, when they come near, you are patient. I am patient among the bees. Where a bee walks with golden feet inside a round white flower, like me inside the tent of apple blossoms, I let him take what he wants, there is enough for all.

With both hands full I shout at the back door. Open up!

My mother wipes flour from her hands on the white flour-sack apron. Her stomach is large because we, my father, mother, and I, are going to have a baby.

Surprise! This is for you!

What on earth, she says. What have you done? Whose are these? Where did you get them?

From the apple tree, these are for you! Surprise!

Mrs. Bosh’s apple tree? Oh no, you didn’t!

This is for Mother’s Day, I say. "This is for you."

She bends down but does not touch the flowers. Mrs. Bosh, she says, does not want children in her yard. Mrs. Bosh does not want children stealing her blossoms. Every blossom is an apple. If you steal a blossom you steal an apple, an apple that you can’t even eat!

You take these right back to Mrs. Bosh and tell her what you did and say you’re sorry—

But these are for you, I repeat. For you!

Ten minutes later with the apple blossom bouquet in my hands I listen to Mrs. Bosh, a tall gaunt lady with tightwound gray hair, explain to me on her back porch that each blossom becomes an apple. I know you didn’t mean it, she says, her teeth clicking, and I know you won’t ever do it again.

I nod, the apple blossoms nod. My arms ache with them. Mrs. Bosh takes them from me and puts them in a blue glass bowl and tells me to walk home carefully, the bowl is very expensive.

At supper they are there on the table floating in the blue glass bowl. I do not look at them. It was a nice idea, my mother says. But from now on I hope you won’t forget where apples come from.

David lies in his buggy in front of the sofa and my mother rocks it with one foot while folding his diapers, a white fluffy mound in her lap. Sometimes rocking the buggy is my job but today he began to cry and she told me to run off and play, and now she is angry.

Beverly did it too, I tell her. She wasn’t chicken.

And what happened then?

Nothing! Nothing, I just got dressed and came home!

I’m not angry with you, she says. I just want to know what happened. What did Vernon do?

He was just the doctor!

She takes the white fluffy mound from her lap and puts it on the floor in the basket. Didn’t I tell you not to go into those woods? Didn’t I?

The woods behind Mrs. Bosh’s chicken coop face north, downward from the ridge of our street toward farmland. They are cool and sandy, the short twiggy trees stand close together. Beverly’s white bottom like two segments of fruit when she twitched her underwear down over her ankles. My peepee cool in Mrs. Bosh’s woods and Vernon sat there with his clothes on and a stick from the tree in his hand.

I didn’t even cross the street. He came over here.

I don’t ever want you to play with that boy again, my mother says. Will you promise me that?

But he didn’t do anything, he just wanted to be the doctor!

I want you to promise me. He is not a good boy to play with and I don’t want you to play with him. Promise?

But Beverly did it! They’ll think I’m chicken!

If you don’t promise, she says, I can’t let you out any more. You’ll have to stay here in the house with me and David.

David in a nest of fat limbs is trying to swallow his rattle which is the size of a ping-pong ball. I wish I could take it away from him. He looks at me and starts to cry.

I didn’t even do anything to him! I tell my mother.

We just went to the hardware store to look at some stuff, that’s all.

My father, my mother, and I, at the table after dinner. On top of the refrigerator the electric fan moves back and forth, back and forth, looking both ways but never crossing the street.

How many times have I told you not to play with him no matter—

I’ll never do it again, I promise.

Wait a minute, my father says. This sounds like a cock and bull story to me. I’d like to get to the bottom of this. ‘Stuff?’ What ‘stuff’?

Just the pocketknives. That stuff. I didn’t know he would take one. He just grabbed it and put it in his pocket and said let’s get out of here and I came straight home.

My father thinks for a minute. He doesn’t know whether he wants to get to the bottom of it or not.

You’re sure you’re not involved in this? You didn’t do anything wrong?

I shake my head. Are you going to call the police?

He looks at me, then at my mother. I wonder if I ought to tell Gus, he says. Gus is the hardware man.

We ought to tell his parents. They’re the ones who ought to know. I ought to have spoken to them long ago.

My father thinks. He doesn’t know me from Adam, he says, thinking. For Pete’s sake don’t look so nervous, he says to me. If you’re telling the truth you’ve got nothing to worry about.

So do you want to go or not?

Vernon braces backside and one boot against the elm, zips his denim jacket up and down on one track only, his cloth cap pulled over his forehead. Vernon always wears a lot of clothes.

You want to be a baby-sucker all your life? he says. Reading your baby picture books?

I am reading STORIES THAT NEVER GROW OLD on the porch steps. While my mother washes and hangs clothes in the back, my job is to sit near David in his buggy and rock it if he cries. I can’t really read but she had read me the stories so often, before David came, that I know them by heart: the little engine that could, the boy who stole the north wind’s magic stick, Shingebis the duck who defied old man winter, and little Hannibal who ran away from home because his mother made him tote and fetch and carry.

The buggy’s brakes are set and David’s eyes are closed beneath the gauzy mosquito net. Well—just for a little while.

‘Just for a little while,’ Vernon says as we walk down the sidewalk. Jesus Christ and God Almighty. What did I say?"

I pause, then quickly: Jesus Christ and —

You lying son of a peter murphy. I said cheese and crackers got all muddy.

I take it in. We pass, on the other side of the street, Mr. Vermeulen and his chickens and geese.

You know something, Vernon? A goose is a better watchdog than a dog. My dad says so. He says geese are vicious animals. One time a goose came after him when he was a kid.

My daddy my daddy. Your daddy my bum wipe. Your old man don’t know spit from shinola. You can tell him I said so.

At the house of the lady with the big dog, the dog isn’t out. "Hey Vern, you