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Cheerful By Request by Edna Ferber

E >> Edna Ferber >> Cheerful By Request




"'G'wan!' I says to him, 'Who you talkin' to? I don't have to take
nothin' from you nor nobody like you,' I says. 'I'm as good as you are
any day, and better. You can have your dirty job,' I says. And with that
I give him my time and walked out on 'm. Je's, he was sore!"

They would listen to him, appreciatively, but with certain mental
reservations; reservations inevitable when a speaker's name is Buzz. One
by one they would melt away as their particular girl, after flaunting by
with a giggle and a sidelong glance for the dozenth time, would switch
her skirts around the corner of Outagamie Street past the Brill House,
homeward bound.

"Well, s'long," they would say. And lounging after her, would overtake
her in the shadow of the row of trees in front of the Agassiz School.

If the Werner family had been city folk they would, perforce, have
burrowed in one of those rabbit-warren tenements that line block after
block of city streets. But your small-town labouring man is likely to
own his two-story frame house with a garden patch in the back and a
cement walk leading up to the front porch, and pork roast on Sundays.
The Werners had all this, no thanks to Pa Werner; no thanks to Buzz,
surely; and little to Minnie Werner who clerked in the Sugar Bowl Candy
Store and tried to dress like Angie Hatton whose father owned the
biggest Pulp and Paper mill in the Fox River Valley. No, the house and
the garden, the porch and the cement sidewalk, and the pork roast all
had their origin in Ma Werner's tireless energy, in Ma Werner's thrift;
in her patience and unremitting toil, her nimble fingers and bent back,
her shapeless figure and unbounded and unexpressed (verbally, that
is) love for her children. Pa Werner--sullen, lazy, brooding,
tyrannical--she soothed and mollified for the children's sake, or
shouted down with a shrewish outburst, as the occasion required. An
expert stone-mason by trade, Pa Werner could be depended on only when he
was not drinking, or when he was not on strike, or when he had not
quarrelled with the foreman. An anarchist, Pa--dissatisfied with things
as they were, but with no plan for improving them. His evil-smelling
pipe between his lips, he would sit, stocking-footed, in silence,
smoking and thinking vague, formless, surly thoughts. This sullen unrest
and rebellion it was that, transmitted to his son, had made Buzz the
unruly braggart that he was, and which, twenty or thirty years hence,
would find him just such a one as his father--useless, evil-tempered,
half brutal, defiant of order.

It was in May, a fine warm sunny day, that Ma Werner, looking up from
the garden patch where she was spading, a man's old battered felt hat
perched grotesquely atop her white head, saw Buzz lounging homeward,
cutting across lots from Bates Street, his dinner pail glinting in the
sun. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. Ma Werner straightened
painfully and her over-flushed face took on a purplish tinge. She wiped
her moist chin with an apron-corner.

As Buzz espied her his gait became a swagger. At sight of that swagger
Ma knew. She dropped her spade and plodded heavily through the freshly
turned earth to the back porch as Buzz turned in at the walk. She
shifted her weight ponderously as she wiped first one earth-crusted shoe
and then the other.

"What's the matter, Ernie? You ain't sick, are you?"

"Naw."

"What you home so early for?"

"Because I feel like it, that's why."

He took the back steps at a bound and slammed the kitchen door behind
him. Ma Werner followed heavily after. Buzz was hanging his hat up
behind the kitchen door. He turned with a scowl as his mother entered.
She looked even more ludicrous in the house than she had outside, with
her skirts tucked up to make spading the easier, so that there was
displayed an unseemly length of thick ankle rising solidly above the old
pair of men's side-boots that encased her feet. The battered hat perched
rakishly atop her knob of gray-white hair gave her a jaunty, sporting
look, as of a ponderous, burlesque Watteau.

She abandoned pretense. "Ernie, your pa'll be awful mad. You know the
way he carried on the last time."

"Let him. He aint worked five days himself this month." Then, at a
sudden sound from the front of the house, "He ain't home, is he?"

"That's the shade flapping."

Buzz turned toward the inside wooden stairway that led to the half-story
above. But his mother followed, with surprising agility for so heavy a
woman. She put a hand on his arm. "Such a good-payin' job, Ernie. An'
you said only yesterday you liked it. Somethin' must've happened."

There broke a grim little laugh from Buzz. "Believe _me_ something
happened good an' plenty." A little frightened look came into his eyes.
"I just had a run-in with young Hatton."

The red faded from her face and a grey-white mask seemed to slip down
over it. "You don't mean Hatton! Not Hatton's son. Ernie, you ain't
done--"

A dash of his street-corner bravado came back to him. "Aw, keep your
hair on, Ma. I didn't know it was young Hatton when I hit'm. An' anyway
nobody his age is gonna tell me where to get off at. Say, w'en a guy who
ain't twenty-three, hardly, and that never done a lick in his life
except go to college, the sissy, tries t'--"

But the first sentence only had penetrated her brain. She grappled with
it, dizzily. "Hit him! Ernie, you don't mean you hit him! Not Hatton's
son! Ernie!"

"Sure I did. You oughta seen his face." But there was very little
triumph or satisfaction in Buzz Werner's face or voice as he said it.
"Course, I didn't know it was him when I done it. I dunno would it have
made any difference if I had."

She seemed so old and so shrunken, in spite of her bulk, as she looked
up at him. The look in her eyes was so strained. The way her hand
brought her apron-corner up to her mouth, as though to stifle the fear
that shook her, was so groping, somehow, so uncertain, that,
paradoxically, the pitifulness of it reacted to make him savage.

When she quavered her next question, "What was he doin' in the mill?" he
turned toward the stairway again, flinging his answer over his shoulder.

"Learnin' the business, that's what. From the ground up, see?" He turned
at the first stair and leaned forward and down, one hand on the
door-jamb. "Well, believe me he don't use me as no ground-dirt. An' when
I'm takin' the screen off the big roll--see?--he comes up to me an'
says I'm handlin' it rough an' it's a delicate piece of mechanism.
'Who're you?' I says. 'Never mind who I am' he says, 'I'm working' on
this job,' he says, 'an' this is a paper mill you're workin' in,' he
says, 'not a boiler factory. Treat the machinery accordin', like a real
workman,' he says. The simp! I just stepped down off the platform of the
big press, and I says, 'Well, you look like a kinda delicate piece of
mechanism yourself,' I says, 'an' need careful handlin', so take that
for a starter,' I says. An' with that I handed him one in the nose."
Buzz laughed, but there was little mirth in it. "I bet he seen enough
wheels an' delicate machinery that minute to set up a whole new plant."

There was nothing of mirth in the woman's drawn face. "Oh, Ernie, f'r
God's sake! What they goin' to do to you!"

He was half way up the narrow stairway, she at the foot of it, peering
up at him. "They won't do anything. I guess old Hatton ain't so stuck on
havin' his swell golf club crowd know his little boy was beat up by one
of the workmen."

He was clumping about upstairs now. So she turned toward the kitchen,
dazedly. She glanced at the clock. Going on toward five. Still in
the absurd hat she got out a panful of potatoes and began to peel
them skilfuly, automatically. The seamed and hardened fingers
had come honestly by their deftness. They had twirled and peeled
pecks--bushels--tons of these brown balls in their time.

At five-thirty Pa came in. At six, Minnie. She had to go back to the
Sugar Bowl until nine. Five minutes later the supper was steaming on
the table.

"Ernie," called Ma, toward the ceiling. "Er-nie! Supper's on." The three
sat down at the table without waiting. Pa had slipped off his shoes, and
was in his stockinged feet. They ate in silence. It was a good meal. A
European family of the same class would have considered it a banquet.
There were meat and vegetables, butter and home-made bread, preserve and
cake, true to the standards of the extravagant American labouring-class
household. In the summer the garden supplied them with lettuce, beans,
peas, onions, radishes, beets, potatoes, corn, thanks to Ma's aching
back and blistered hands. They stored enough vegetables in the cellar to
last through the winter.

Buzz usually cleaned up after supper. But to-night, when he came down,
he was already clean-shaven, clean-shirted, and his hair was wet from
the comb. He took his place in silence. His acid-stained work shoes had
been replaced by his good tan ones. Evidently he was going down town
after supper. Buzz never took any exercise for the sake of his body's
good. Sometimes he and the Lembke boys across the way played a game of
ball in the middle of the road, or in the vacant lot, but they did it
out of the game instinct, and with no thought of their muscles' gain.

But to-night, evidently, there was to be no ball. Buzz ate little. His
mother, forever between the stove and the table, ate less. But that was
nothing unusual in her. She waited on the others, but mostly she hovered
about the boy.

"Ernie, you ain't eaten your potatoes. Look how nice an' mealy they
are."

"Don't want none."

"Ernie, would you rather have a baked apple than the raspberry preserve?
I fixed a pan this morning."

"Naw. Lemme alone. I ain't hungry."

He slouched from the table. Minnie, teacup in hand, regarded him over
its rim with wide, malicious eyes. "I saw that Kearney girl go by here
before supper, and she rubbered in like everything."

"You're a liar," said Buzz, unemotionally.

"I did so! She went by and then she came back again. I saw her both
times. Say, I guess I ought to know her. Anybody in town'd know
Kearney."

Buzz had been headed toward the front porch. He hesitated and turned,
now, and picked up the newspaper from the sitting-room sofa. Pa Werner,
in trousers, shirt and suspenders, was padding about the kitchen with
his pipe and tobacco. He came into the sitting room now and stood a
moment, his lips twisted about the pipe-stem. The pipe's putt-putting
gave warning that he was about to break into unaccustomed speech. He
regarded Buzz with beady, narrowed eyes.

"You let me see you around with that Kearney girl and I'll break every
bone in your body, and hers too. The hussy!"

"Oh, you will, will you?"

Ma, who had been making countless trips from the kitchen to the back
garden with water pail and sprinkling can sagging from either arm, put
in a word to stay the threatening storm. "Now, Pa! Now, Ernie!" The two
men subsided into bristling silence.

Suddenly, "There she is again!" shrilled Minnie, from her bedroom. Buzz
shrank back in his chair. Old man Werner, with a muttered oath, went to
the open doorway and stood there, puffing savage little spurts of smoke
streetward. The Kearney girl stared brazenly at him as she strolled
slowly by, a slim and sinister figure. Old man Werner watched her until
she passed out of sight.

"You go gettin' mixed up with dirt like that," threatened he, "and I'll
learn you. She'll be hangin' around the mill yet, the brass-faced thing.
If I hear of it I'll get the foreman to put her off the place. You'll
stay home to-night. Carry a pail of water for your ma once."

"Carry it yourself."

Buzz, with a wary eye up the street, slouched out to the front porch,
into the twilight of the warm May evening. Charley Lembke, from his
porch across the street, called to him: "Goin' down town?"

"Yeh, I guess so."

"Ain't you afraid of bein' pinched?" Buzz turned his head quickly
toward the room just behind him. He turned to go in. Charley's voice
came again, clear and far-reaching. "I hear you had a run-in with
Hatton's son, and knocked him down. Some class t' you, Buzz, even if it
does cost you your job."

From within the sound of a newspaper hurled to the floor. Pa Werner was
at the door. "What's that! What's that he's sayin'?"

Buzz, cornered, jutted a threatening jaw at his father and brazened it
out. "Can't you hear good?"

"Come on in here."

Buzz hesitated a moment. Then he turned, slowly, and walked into the
little sitting room with an attempt at a swagger that failed to convince
even himself. He leaned against the side of the door, hands in pockets.
Pa Werner faced him, black-browed. "Is that right, what he said? Lembke?
Huh?"

"Sure it's right. I had a run-in with Hatton, an' licked him, and give'm
my time. What you goin' to do about it?"

Ma Werner was in the room, now. Minnie, passing through on her way to
work again, caught the electric current of the storm about to break and
escaped it with a parting:

"Oh, for the land's sakes! You two. Always a-fighting."

The two men faced each other. The one a sturdy man-boy nearing twenty,
with a great pair of shoulders and a clear eye, a long, quick arm and a
deft hand--these last his assets as a workman. The other, gnarled,
prematurely wrinkled, almost gnome-like. This one took his pipe from
between his lips and began to speak. The drink he had had at Wenzel's on
the way home sparked his speech.

He began with a string of epithets. They flowed from his lips, an acid
stream. Pick and choose as I will, there is none that can be repeated
here. Old Man Werner had, perhaps, been something of a tough guy
himself, in his youth. As he reviled his son now you saw that son, at
fifty, just such another stocking-footed, bitter old man, smoking a glum
pipe on the back porch, summer evenings, and spitting into the fresh
young grass.

I don't say that this thought came to Buzz as his father flayed him with
his abuse. But there was something unusual, surely, in the
non-resistance with which he allowed the storm to beat about his head.
Something in his steady, unruffled gaze caused the other man to falter a
little in his tirade, and finally to stop, almost apprehensively. He had
paid no heed to Ma Werner's attempts at pacification. "Now, Pa!" she had
said, over and over, her hand on his arm, though he shook it off again
and again. "Now, Pa!--" But he stopped now, fist raised in a last
profane period. Buzz stood regarding him with his unblinking stare.

Finally: "You through?" said Buzz.

"Ya-as," snarled Pa, "I'm through. Get to hell out of here. You'll be
hung yet, you loafer. A good-for-nothing bum, that's what. Get out o'
here!"

"I'm gettin'," said Buzz. He took his hat off the hook and wiped it
carefully with the lower side of his sleeve, round and round. He placed
it on his head, jauntily. He stepped to the kitchen, took a tooth-pick
from the little red-and-white glass holder on the table, and--with this
emblem of insouciance, at an angle of ninety, between his
teeth--strolled indolently, nonchalantly down the front steps, along the
cement walk to the street and so toward town. The two old people, left
alone in the sudden silence of the house, stared after the swaggering
figure until the dim twilight blotted it out. And a sinister something
seemed to close its icy grip about the heart of one of them. A vague
premonition that she could only feel, not express, made her next words
seem futile.

"Pa, you oughtn't to talked to him like that. He's just a little wild.
He looked so kind of funny when he went out. I don'no, he looked so kind
of--"

"He looked like the bum he is, that's what. No respect for nothing. For
his pa, or ma, or nothing. Down on the corner with the rest of 'em,
that's where he's goin'. Hatton ain't goin' to let this go by. You see."

But she, on her way to the kitchen, repeated, "I don'no, he looked so
kind of funny. He looked so kind of--"

Considering all things--the happenings of the past few hours, at
least--Buzz, as he strolled on down toward Grand Avenue with his
sauntering, care-free gait, did undoubtedly look kind of funny. The
red-hot rage of the afternoon and the white-hot rage of the evening had
choked the furnace of brain and soul with clinkers so that he was
thinking unevenly and disconnectedly. On the surface he was cool and
unruffled. He stopped for a moment at the railroad tracks to talk with
Stumpy Gans, the one-legged gateman. The little bell above Stumpy's
shanty was ringing its warning, so he strolled leisurely over to the
depot platform to see the 7:15 come in from Chicago. When the train
pulled out Buzz went on down the street. His mind was darting here and
there, planning this revenge, discarding it; seizing on another,
abandoning that. He'd show'm. He'd show'm. Sick of the whole damn bunch,
anyway.... Wonder was Hatton going to raise a shindy.... Let'm. Who
cares?... The old man was a drunk, that's what.... Ma had looked kinda
sick....

He put that uncomfortable thought out of his mind and slammed the door
on it. Anyway, he'd show'm.

Out of the shadows of the great trees in front of the Agassiz School
stepped the Kearney girl, like a lean and hungry cat. One hand clutched
his arm.

Buzz jumped and said something under his breath. Then he laughed,
shortly. "Might as well kill a guy as scare him to death!"

She thrust one hand through his arm and linked it with the other. "I've
been waiting for you, Buzz."

"Yeh. Well, let me tell you something. You quit traipsing up and down in
front of my house, see?"

"I wanted to see you. An' I didn't know whether you was coming down town
to-night or not."

"Well, I am. So now you know." He pulled away from her, but she twined
her arm the tighter about his.

"Ain't sore at me, are yuh, Buzz?"

"No. Leggo my arm."

"If you're sore because I been foolin' round with that little wart of a
Donahue--" She turned wise eyes up to him, trying to make them limpid in
the darkness.

"What do I care who you run with?"

"Don't you care, Buzz?" The words were soft but there was a steel edge
to her utterance.

"No."

"Oh, Buzz, I'm batty about you. I can't help it, can I? H'm? Look here,
you go on to Grand, and hang around for an hour, maybe, and I'll meet
you here an' we'll walk a ways. Will you? I got something to tell you."

"Naw, I can't to-night. I'm busy."

And then the steel edge cut. "Buzz, if you turn me down I'll have you
up."

"Up?"

"Before old Colt. I can fix up charges. He'll believe it. Say, he knows
me, Judge Colt does. I can name you an'--"

"Me!" Sheer amazement rang in his voice. "Me? You must be crazy. I
ain't had anything to do with you. You make me sick."

"That don't make any difference. You can't prove it. I told you I was
crazy about you. I told you--"

He jerked loose from her then and was off. He ran one block. Then, after
a backward glance, fell into a quick walk that brought him past the
Brill House and to Schroeder's drug store corner. There was his
crowd--Spider, and Red, and Bing, and Casey. They took him literally
unto their breasts. They thumped him on the back. They bestowed on him
the low epithets with which they expressed admiration. Red worked at one
of the bleaching vats in the Hatton paper mill. The story of Buzz's
fistic triumph had spread through the big plant like a flame.

"Go on, Buzz, tell 'em about it," Red urged, now. "Je's, I like to died
laughing when I heard it. He must of looked a sight, the poor boob. Go
on, Buzz, tell 'em how you says to him he must be a kind of delicate
piece of--you know; go on, tell 'em."

Buzz hitched himself up with a characteristic gesture, and plunged into
his story. His audience listened entranced, interrupting him with an
occasional "Je's!" of awed admiration. But the thing seemed to lack a
certain something. Perhaps Casey put his finger on that something when,
at the recital's finish he asked:

"Didn't he see you was goin' to hit him?"

"No. He never see a thing."

Casey ruminated a moment. "You could of give him a chanst to put up his
dukes," he said at last. A little silence fell upon the group. Honour
among thieves.

Buzz shifted uncomfortably. "He's a bigger guy than I am. I bet he's
over six foot. The papers was always telling how he played football at
that college he went to."

Casey spoke up again. "They say he didn't wait for this here draft. He's
goin' to Fort Sheridan, around Chicago somewhere, to be made a officer."

"Yeh, them rich guys, they got it all their own way," Spider spoke up,
gloomily. "They--"

From down the street came a dull, muffled thud-thud-thud-thud. Already
Chippewa, Wisconsin, had learned to recognise it. Grand Avenue, none too
crowded on this mid-week night, pressed to the curb to see. Down the
street they stared toward the moving mass that came steadily nearer. The
listless group on the corner stiffened into something like interest.

"Company G," said Red. "I hear they're leavin' in a couple of days."

And down the street they came, thud-thud-thud, Company G, headed for the
new red-brick Armory for the building of which they had engineered
everything from subscription dances and exhibition drills to turkey
raffles. Chippewa had never taken Company G very seriously until now.
How could it, when Company G was made up of Willie Kemp, who clerked in
Hassell's shoe store; Fred Garvey, the reporter on the Chippewa
_Eagle_; Hermie Knapp, the real-estate man, and Earl Hanson who came
around in the morning for your grocery order.

Thud-thud-thud-thud. And to Chippewa, standing at the curb, quite
suddenly these every-day men and boys were transformed into something
remote and almost terrible. Something grim. Something sacrificial.
Something sacred.

Thud-thud-thud-thud. Looking straight ahead.

"The poor boobs," said Spider, and spat, and laughed.

The company passed on down the street--vanished. Grand Avenue went its
way.

A little silence fell upon the street-corner group. Bing was the first
to speak.

"They won't git me in this draft. I got a mother an' two kid sisters to
support."

"Yeh, a swell lot of supportin' you do!"

"Who says I don't! I can prove it."

"They'll get me all right," said Casey. "I ain't kickin'."

"I'm under age," from Red.

Spider said nothing. His furtive eyes darted here and there. Spider was
of age. And Spider had no family to support. But Spider had reason to
know that no examining board would pass him into the army of his
country. And it was a reason of which one did not speak. "You're only
twenty, ain't you, Buzz?" he asked, to cover the gap in the
conversation.

"Yeh." Silence fell again. Then, "But I wouldn't mind goin'. Anything
for a change. This place makes me sick."

Spider laughed. "You better be a hero and go and enlist."

Buzz's head came up with a jerk. "Je's, I never thought of that!"

Red struck an attitude, one hand on his breast. "Now's your chanct,
Buzz, to save your country an' your flag. Enlistment office's right over
the Golden Eagle clothing store. Step up. Don't crowd gents! This way!"

Buzz was staring at him, open-mouthed. His gaze was fixed, tense.
Suddenly he seemed to gather all his muscles together as for a spring.
But he only threw his cigarette into the gutter, yawned elaborately, and
moved away. "S'long," he said; and lounged off. The others looked after
him a moment, puzzled, speculative. Buzz was not usually so laconic. But
evidently he was leaving with no further speech.

"I guess maybe he ain't so dead sure that Hatton bunch won't git him for
this, anyway," Casey said. Then, raising his voice: "Goin' home, Buzz?"

"Yeh."

But he did not. If they had watched him they would have seen him change
his lounging gait when he reached the corner. They would have seen him
stand a moment, sending a quick glance this way and that, then turn,
retrace his steps almost at a run, and dart into the doorway that led
to the flight of wooden stairs at the side of the Golden Eagle clothing
store.

A dingy room. A man at a bare table. Another seated at the window, his
chair tipped back, his feet on the sill, a pipe between his teeth. Buzz,
shambling, suddenly awkward, stood in the door.

"This the place where you enlist?"

The man at the table stood up. The chair in front of the open window
came down on all-fours.

"Sure," said the first man. "What's your name?"

Buzz told him.

"Meet Sergeant Keith. He's a Canadian. Been through the whole game."

Five minutes later Buzz's fine white torso rose above his trousers like
a great pillar. Unconsciously his sagging shoulders had straightened.
His stomach was held in. His chest jutted, shelf-like. His ribs showed
through the pink-white flesh.

"Get some of that pork off of him," observed Sergeant Keith, "and he'll
do in a couple of Fritzes before he's through."

"Me!" blurted Buzz, struggling now with his shirt. "A couple! Say, you
don't know me. Whaddyou mean, a couple? I can lick a whole regiment of
them beerheads with one hand tied behind me an' my feet in a sack." He
emerged from the struggle with his shirt, his face very red, his hair
rumpled.