Twenty-One Stories: Some True, Some Imagined

By Nancy Palmie

These 21 thematically-connected stories, told in first and third person, describe the provocative and the minutiae of small-town experiences in Wisconsin, the Rocky Mountain range, and California.

The ins-and-outs of small-town life and townspeople come to life within these familiar, bittersweet, and inspiring short stories. Palmie gets to the heart of her stories through piercing detail. In Twenty-One Stories, the reader will step into a world where the common occurs, but Palmie puts her own twist on what is expected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664190924

Nancy Palmie

Nancy Palmie, a technical writer and novelist, grew up in rural Wisconsin and now lives in the high mountains of Colorado. She’s the woman behind the Ledger Law and two other books, The Open Season and The Road to Mama Bear.

Book preview

DAIRYLAND

I often dream of the Midwest, though I haven’t lived in it for two thirds of my life. I remember the townies and the farmers whose outlook was more rural than urban. I recall many details of a small town that was exceptionally neat, shady, and proud. In the spring the lawns were green, the roses bloomed, and the railroad that ran through town had straight bright rails that hummed as the train approached. St. Peter’s church bells rang every hour, welcoming me back again.

It was a self-contained little town that served many neighboring townships. When I was a child, there were three or four restaurants, bars, WASP and Catholic churches, banks, barbers, grocery stores, a Ford dealer, a drug store, a hardware store, an appliance store, stores that sell feed, grain, and farm equipment, an antique shop, a poolroom, two laundromats, three doctors, dentists, plumbers, vets, funeral homes, and two sets of stoplights. There were many clubs: VFW, 4-H, PTA, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Rainbows, Masons, Moose Lodge, Elks, Optimists, Women’s Book Club, the Sunshine Society, American Legion, Bridge Club, Chamber of Commerce, and probably many more I didn’t know about. My mother, siblings, and I belonged to none of them.

Most of the dwellings were fairly spacious farm houses in the customary white, with wide wraparound porches and tall narrow windows, though there were—and still are—many of the grander kind—fretted, scalloped, turreted, and decorated with clapboards set at angles or on end, with stained-glass windows at the stair landings and lots of wrought iron full of fancy curls.

Generations of families are buried in the enormous, beautiful cemetery outside of town, including my own. Some of the big, drafty houses are dying, as are the folks who inhabit them. The elderly folks are slowly losing their senses—deafness, blindness, forgetfulness, mumbling, an insecure gait, an uncontrollable trembling has overcome them. Large families might take over these houses, undertaking makeshift repairs with materials that other people have thrown away; paint halfway around their house, then quit. They might own an ugly, loud, cantankerous dog and underfeed a pair of cats to keep the rodents down. They will collect piles of possibly useful junk in the backyard, which could easily sit untouched for years, and weeds will take over the property.

Just outside the town is the country, where growling tractors tear the earth. Dust roils up behind them. Drivers steer by looking at the tracks they’ve cut behind them. Each farm smells different, depending on what the barns are used for. The best farm smells like good quality hay and freshly-turned, rich, moist soil. If the barn is used to milk cows, it will have the smell of disinfectant and the smell of cows, feed, and a bit of manure. The worst farm smells like rotten eggs and decay.

The sky in the winter is heavy and close, and it is a rare day, a day to talk about to the neighbors, when the sky lifts and allows the sun to peek through. Many days go by without a glimpse of the sun. The sides of the buildings, the roofs, the limbs of trees are gray. Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings—everything is gray. It warms up just enough to snow, and then, again, it is gray.

Because we knew nothing different, the Wisconsin climate didn’t seem unnatural. Snow endured for months, well into spring, hard-crusted, dirty, and unforgiving. The freeze-free season ranges only about eighty days per year. In those eighty days of non-freezing temperatures, it rains. So basically, we had nine months of cold and three months of mosquitos. During the winter, it wasn’t safe to be outside. After the long, cold winters, and in spite of the humidity, we couldn’t wait for summer, when time stretched thick and slow.

Summer nights in Wisconsin have an eerie quality. We would usually be outside when the evening rains came, and they came most days just before dusk. Most parents would call their kids in, to protect them from the thunder and lightning, but nobody called us in. Instead, we splashed at the warm water in the gutters and raised our faces to the sky as the rain poured down in torrents. When the rain stopped as abruptly as it began, swarms of mosquitos attacked us, followed by trucks that blasted their obnoxious smoke and odor as they made their way through the small town. The air was heavy; blue halos quietly surrounded houses in this bedroom community that was barely on the Wisconsin state map.

Friends’ grandparents and our great aunt Alice seemed very old when we were very young. They had a thin white mist of hair, fine and tangled. My sisters and brother and I talked to them (or, more accurately, they talked and we muttered appropriately). They talked about their grandchildren who lived somewhere else, their sister or brother—both gone—obscure friends—dead—obscurer aunts and uncles—lost—ancient neighbors, members of her church or of her clubs—passed or passing on. And, in this way, they brought the end of their life together with a terrifying rush: She was a girl, a wife, a mother, widow, all at once. As a story ended, we winced in anticipation of the next story.

Most days, an old German named Otto S. sat outside on his porch across the street. His house was the size of a single garage, and very old. It shed its paint and its boards were warped and weathered gray. He wore a short lumpy faded black coat when it was cold; otherwise, he wore the same flannel shirt and trousers. Otto lived alone for as long as we lived there. He spit when he spoke and he always needed a shave.

Friday nights were very special. After school, we would meet Mom at the bowling alley where she’d be sitting with friends, sipping brown cocktails with ice and cherries in them. Mom gave each of us a dollar except for Kate, who got more because she was in charge. From the bowling alley, we skipped the three blocks to Main Street, up to Paul’s Cozy Corner. We ate cheeseburgers and French fries served in plastic red baskets. Afterwards, we passed the old-timey popcorn stand, where the smell of tobacco, buttered popcorn, newsprint, and cotton candy hung heavy in the air. We’d sometimes go to the penny candy store and load up on Pixy Stix, rock candy, and cinnamon teddy bears. If we were short on time, we’d get our sugar at the Badger Theater concessions stand before the movie started. For me, it was a toss-up between an orange push-up or a small popcorn (three cents extra for an additional squirt of real butter).

Always one of the first to arrive, we’d race each other down the aisle to the front row, where we could lean back and look up at the screen like we were watching a rocket blast into the air. It didn’t matter what was playing, we’d watch anything. Movies that were terrifying were especially appealing.

Once a year, the town threw a big three-day party called Butterfest, where merchants promoted themselves. There were rides, raucous music, parades, pop, popcorn, candy, cones, awards, with all you can endure of pinch, push, bawl, shove, shout, scream, shriek, and bellow. Children pedaled past on decorated bicycles of streaming crinkled paper. There were shows for a prize—dogs, cats, sheep, ponies, goats, pies, pickles.

Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the Midwest. All topics that are supposedly taboo are nonetheless a source of constant discontent. The discussions sap the body’s strength. Appalling quantities of money, time, and energy are wasted on them, but the rural mind is passionate, and reckless on these matters.

My childhood came in the Midwest. I remember the flies on the kitchen table. The swatter was a square of screen bound down in red cloth. Flies trapped themselves on the sticky flypaper in our grandmother’s old farmhouse. I can smell the bakery and the grocery and the blacksmith in that small town I knew as a kid. I can see the old, faded wallpaper, sheets and sheets of big red roses that popped like 3-D from a faded, vertical blue-striped background.

We knew every square inch of that town. We knew many houses. We visited folks, going from one house to the next. Friends invited us in; their kindness came from food they offered, questions they asked, and the smiles and stories they shared.

Midwesterners tend to hoard, especially the silent-generation (those born and raised during the Great Depression) and the baby boomers. In the houses are stacks of newspapers, boxes of leaflets and letters and programs, racks of photo albums, scrapbooks, bundles of rolled-up posters and maps, flags and pennants and slanting piles of dusty magazines. A bird cage, a trumpet, scarves tied to a coat tree, rubber galoshes lined up by the door, driving gloves and eyeglasses, photographs on the wall, bronzed baby shoes, countless boxes of medals, pins, trinkets, keys. There is clutter, everywhere.

THE CLIFF

I barely remembered before. Maybe I didn’t remember anything about Champagne, Illinois, where Daddy, Mom, and us kids lived in a real house with our own twin beds and a big, grassy backyard. Maybe the images I had in my head—of Daddy lifting us on his broad shoulders or reading us a bedtime story—were remnants of images I’d imagined.

Now all of us except for Daddy were back in our small Wisconsin town, living in Mom’s best friend Mary’s house. Mary was divorced, and she had two kids: Melanie and Mike. Melanie was around my oldest sister Kate’s age, and Mike was between Lucy and me. We were all a little confused, shoved into a smallish two-story house, but we all instinctively knew to behave ourselves, for this arrangement felt like real survival, even at our tender ages. These are my earliest clear memories, from when I was four years old.

I was five when I woke up in a small, white room with bright lights and metal cabinets. I stared for a while at the ceiling panels, and then I heard a man’s deep voice telling Mom I was going to be okay. I heard Mom’s shaky voice reverberating down the corridor, thanking Dr. Knight, the same man who had delivered Lucy, me, and Philip.

The doctor leaned over me and his kind eyes and gentle voice comforted me. He asked me to think of something that made me feel happy, and then he asked me to count to ten. I thought of my dirty hairless doll, the one I carried with me most of the time. The nurse squeezed my hand and when I woke up, there was a heavy, clunky, plaster cast on my broken arm.

Most days, all of us kids, including Melanie and Mike, walked two blocks to the bluff by the water tower in the middle of town. A bunch of trees bordered the path that led to the municipal swimming pool. Most people didn’t know about it, but we knew it well. For a town that is mostly flat, this 50-foot bluff stood out as a noteworthy landmark. From it, if you squatted and leaned just-so, you could see Webb Park and beyond to the Baraboo River. I leaned too far, lost my footing, and that’s all I could remember.

When I woke from the anesthesia, I heard Mom explaining what she thought must have happened in a soft, even tone. Her voice sounded shaky and sad to me and I wanted to give her a hug. She said the men at the bottom of the bluff were tarring the road and they heard me screaming and ran to help. I landed square on a picker bush which broke my fall. She didn’t want to think about, much less talk about, what could have happened, and I sensed she felt the sudden fragility of her world that was crashing down around her.

Nan has always been my clumsy cat! Mom said to the doctor. I call her Grace because she is always falling over things and hurting herself. I swear, she has nine lives!

The nurse came in regularly with food—even ice cream—and I gobbled it all up. I loved all the special attention. The nurse smiled at me and said I had been very lucky. She said it wasn’t my time, and I wondered to myself, my time for what?

Then another lady came in but I didn’t like her much at all. She smelled funny and she wore a burnt orange polyester suit that didn’t fit very well. Her lips were set in a straight line and her eyes, like slits, told me she didn’t like me. (The feeling was mutual, but I kept this to myself.) Then she smiled at me. That is, she drew her lips apart and stretched them to each side, exposing her teeth. I did the same, to her. She asked me questions, writing furiously on a clipboard.

How did you fall?

Who were you with when you fell?

"What was the last thing you remember?

Where was your mother?

Where is your father?

I didn’t understand and I had no idea the woman was a social worker, sent from Child Services. She was writing so fast the clipboard bobbed up and down and I thought her bony fingers would fall off her veiny hand.

I rattled off happy little stories of how we (Kate, Lucy, Philip, and I) loved to walk to the pool and swim most days. I told her our mother had to work, so it was just us, and now Melanie and Mike. I added that our Dad lived somewhere else. The lady got this huge wrinkle between her eyes and she tsk’d and shook her head a couple of times. It was good timing that Dr. Knight came in to check on me right then. He must have noticed I looked confused because he excused the lady in the orange suit and I never saw her again.

I stayed in the hospital for a day and a half. I loved that it wasn’t as noisy as it was back at Mary’s, where Kate, Lucy, and I shared a bed upstairs in a room that wasn’t very clean. Lots of people came to visit and signed my bright white cast with different colored pens. I felt so special I didn’t want to ever take that cast off.

Mom had been through a lot. But she kept smiling anyway and looked so pretty and young in her white nurse’s dress that fit her trim body perfectly. She was just 30 years old and I now know how bravely she was trying to keep it together.

Tumbling down the bluff and being questioned by Child Social Services didn’t change anything. A few days after I left the hospital with a cast on my arm, I was walking by myself through the path that leads to the bluff when a strange man approached me. He’d been hiding in the brush, watching me and when I noticed him, he looked around to make sure nobody could see us. Then he pulled down his pants and exposed his private parts to me and said he would give me a nickel if I would touch it. I yelled "no!" and started to run away from him and I didn’t look back. After that, I avoided that shortcut altogether.

THE TRAILER IN

THE COUNTRY

O ne night, Mom came home from the bowling alley (where she often stopped after work to socialize). She had with her fried shrimp and crinkly fries, a real treat. As we scarfed down the food, she told us we were going to live in a white trailer, outside city limits. What could we say? I’m sure the general sentiment was that this white trailer had to be better than that haunted house on Park Street. The news came not a moment too soon for me.

It was just after Halloween, cold but not yet freezing. Mom was wearing her white nurse’s dress and still smiling, gently teaching us about love. She hugged us and sometimes, she even laughed and the light reached her pretty blue eyes. I liked our life for the short time we lived there.

We had great imaginations and we fed off each other. Once we were settled in to country life (as it turns out, the country was only a few miles outside of town), Lucy, Philip, and I made little forts out of cardboard boxes and we played in the ditch. We took photos of each other with Kate’s new camera, and who knows where the money might have come from to pay for the film or for the cost to develop the photos, but we were having fun, bonding and growing up very fast, without much concern for what would come next.

It seemed we were always hightailing it from one place to the next. By the time we moved into the white trailer, our sibling relationships had already been loosely established. Kate was clearly the dominant figure, more like a watchful guardian than a big sister to Lucy, Philip and me. Philip was the little brother and by the very nature of his gender, he was naturally interested in boy-things. Lucy, who was two years older, had been more than a sister to me, she’d become my best friend. We had formed a tight bond that remained unbreakable.

In her early years, Lucy had been a concern for our mom. She didn’t talk much until she was three years old, and lore has it that she didn’t have to, because Kate did all the talking for her. Her vocabulary consisted of two-word exclamations like ee-yah! when she was excited or wanted to make a point. Then one day she just started talking in complete sentences, to the delight of Mom and the speech pathologist.

Whereas Kate seemed to enjoy a noisy throng of people, Lucy was the kind of person who enjoyed spending time alone reading or playing solitaire. Sometimes, we did not speak for periods of time because she was lost in her thoughts or a mystery novel; the Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew series were among her favorites. There were times when I literally threw a book Lucy was reading into the trash or fireplace, to get her attention focused back on me. That’s how much I depended on Lucy to make me feel like I was a normal kid.

She and I often went together for walks in the woods, or we went ice skating in the frozen ponds, sometimes under the stars. We entertained one another with tales of witches and goblins from the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, most notably Hansel and Gretel. As children, everything was mysterious and we were full of wonder and naivete. With each new adventure, with the passing of time, our memories became our own and we would shape those memories into the stories of who we are. We would be brave or we’d be afraid. We’d be loving or we’d be closed off for lack of trust. The next few years would be pivotal in how we would view ourselves, and how we would learn to protect ourselves against the world.

LIBRARIES AND

LAUNDROMATS

O ur town was a tight community filled with traditions and annual events like the 4 th of July parade and fireworks. Sharing sounds and smells and having close contact with people you’ve known all your life was not something we took for granted.

The spacious, century-old house Mary found for us had a wrap-around porch, stained glass windows, and big drafty rooms with walk-in closets. It had a full-length attic filled with artifacts carefully tucked away in trunks as old as the Civil War. We snooped through the trunks to find dishes, photographs, blankets, handmade nails, keys, cast iron cooking gadgets, and clothing, including military uniforms and ladies’ costumes complete with hats, boots, and scarves.

The thing about privacy, or lack of it (as it had been our entire lives), there’s no way to relax, no place to dream. And for members of a family who have always lived together in the heated intensity of daily drama, life is too close-up, too head-on. There’s no place to hide. As kids do, we started to fight and we started to look for spaces we could call our own. We each claimed one of the lockable walk-in closets as our sanctuary, off-limits to everyone but ourselves.

At one point, I made that musty attic my private space and I even slept up there, creepy as it was. It became my habit to shut myself in that space for hours at a time. Loving the alone time, I’d flip through photo albums, or read books, or go through the dusty boxes that previous tenants had abandoned. But it was dirty and dark and filled with spiders and mice, so after a few days I gave up my private space and moved back downstairs, into the bedroom I shared with Kate and Lucy. Kate sang and laughed and talked all the time, even in her sleep! The house was filled with the sounds of Kate’s music: Paul Revere and the Raiders, Lulu (from ‘To Sir, with Love’), the Monkeys, the Beatles, the Carpenters. Kate had big ambitions for a musical career which lasted well into the rest of her life. She always had a lovely singing voice.

The huge side yard was filled with lilac bushes, our mother’s favorite flower, from which we plugged sprigs and put them into vases and set them on the kitchen table. We hung from the branches of a mature chestnut tree, acting like monkeys. The yard was so large we played games of kickball with four bases and we had so much fun that kids from the neighborhood eventually joined in.

During the summer, we left all the windows open. We had no air conditioning and summers were stifling hot so Mom placed the fan facing outwards to circulate the air. The town had very little crime but it did have its fair share of perverts and degenerates. Still, we left all the doors unlocked, even when we left town. Same with the car: we never locked it, of course nobody ever locked anything back then. I was terrified to be left alone in that big, drafty house. I can still recall hearing the creaky noises, knowing there were so many places a person could hide out. Everywhere else, at the library or at the school, or even on the way to and from those places, I was part of a group, but when I was alone, I never learned to feel safe in that house.

In the warm summer months, hundred-year-old trees bowed down to meet each other in the middle of the streets. Roses and lilacs and daisies blossomed everywhere and Mom’s mood noticeably shifted. She’d load us up and drive us through the green rolling hills to Devil’s Lake or Lake Redstone, where we would swim and have a picnic.

While lying in her bed smoking cigarettes, Mom read a wide range of books. She read most evenings before she went to sleep, never apologizing or explaining that she should probably be doing something more productive, like washing or mending clothes or cooking, or helping us with our homework. From Mom, we learned to appreciate all kinds of literature.

We all loved to hang out at the town’s library, a sturdy brownstone building just a few blocks away. We had our favorite types of books. Kate gravitated to New York Times bestsellers or self-help books that she could discuss with her friends. Lucy was an obsessive reader, like Mom. She read