Truth Be Told

Syvert died on a Wednesday. I remember for sure, because I didn’t find his body until I got home from choir practice. Choir practice is always on Wednesday.

I got home late, too, because Dora Nelson – she’s our choir director, though I don’t honestly think she should be choir directing at all. She has three kids and if you ask me, she should be home raising her kids right and not out gallivanting around. Did you know she sings with a band? And not some nice church band, either. Here she’s miss bossy to us choir folks on Wednesday nights, and the rest of the weekend she trots around singing in Meagher’s Bar and Grill like some dance hall girl. Then she has the nerve to show up all shiny clean on Sunday morning like she’s this angel from heaven. And all the while, her three kids just sitting at home with her husband or a babysitter, like they had no mother at all.

I suppose it’s for the best that Meagher’s got shut down last week. And I don’t say that just because of the rats in the pantry and the roaches they found in the food, mind you, but because now Dora is back home with her kids most nights, except of course for Wednesdays. That’s the way things should be.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Dora Nelson finally gave me a solo, and I stayed after practice so she could help me polish up the rough spots. It’s a little out of my range, so the high notes were giving me a bit of a tickle. It’s going to sound good, though, don’t you worry about that. You ask me for help on something and I’ll do the best darn job that can be done, and that includes singing solos on Sunday.

Beautiful music takes some hard work, you know, so I didn’t get home until close to 10:30 that night. Syvert never stays up past 8:30, so I didn’t figure on seeing him ‘til morning. I guess that’s why I walked right on past him the first couple times I went by the couch.

See, I was hurrying to get ready for bed, what with getting home so late from choir and having to get up early on Thursday morning. Thursdays I do my volunteer work at the library bookstore, and I have to get there to set out the book carts before the doors open at nine, otherwise the whole morning is all a-kilter. Never fails: if the carts aren’t ready smack on time, there’s looky-loos been waiting at the door since eight-thirty and they will not wait for me to set up proper.

You’d think they’d be more considerate to me, what with the last gal who ran the bookstore up and falling right off the balcony last year. I’m sure word got out that she might have jumped off on her own from the stress of it all (I remember for certain I myself mentioned that to a customer now and then), so they ought to treat me nice since I’m the only one in town who can make sure the bookstore gets run right. I tell you, if that money didn’t pay for new books, I’d just tell them to back off or I wouldn’t be helping at all.

‘Course that’s not how I operate, you know. Not one to put folks in their place when there’s work to be done. Now Syvert, he’d tell you off as sure as he’d look at you, if you gave him a chance. More’n once I told him he was going to get his fat head bashed in, running his mouth the way he did. I feel sorta bad about that, seeing how things turned out for him.

Don’t you go thinking Syvert was a trouble maker, now. He never did start a problem on his own. He was just bound to be the fellow to settle up when one person or the other wasn’t quite able to find their way to making things right.

Like that time Hiram Olson went and near caused an accident, swinging his fool arm out the window of that old jalopy of his, instead of taking the time to get his turn signal fixed up. When I told Syvert how I about slammed into a tree from being distracted by Hiram’s shenanigans, he called that lunatic on the phone and cleared him up on a few issues of driver safety.

Old Hiram didn’t take too kindly to Syvert’s considerations, but he learned his lesson soon enough when he backed over his own dog the very next day. Slammed right into the neighbor’s garage, too, before that big monster of a truck came to a stop. He tried to blame Syvert, of course, but even that dipstick Sheriff Iverson had to admit that if Hiram didn’t get his turn signal working after all this time, he couldn’t rightly say he was keeping up with other stuff, like those brakes. That brake fluid could have been leaking out real slow and he wouldn’t likely have fixed that neither.

I gotta give Iverson his dues, though. He was downright professional when he came over and helped clear Syvert’s stinky corpse on out of the TV room. All polite and calling me “Miz Anders” like he didn’t used to yank on my pigtails back in the day. Some of his questions were a might nosey, but probably he was just doing his best to check into things so I’d know he was doing his job and all.

Didn’t like the look he and his helper gave me when I offered them some tea, if I do say so. Like just because there’s been some trouble, we’re supposed to throw niceness to the wind and act like we never even heard how to act civilized. If Syvert had been in a talking way, he would have set them straight on the ways of polite society, I promise you that.

So they wouldn’t have tea right then, which means now I have to send some kind of thank you on over to the jailhouse. I don’t mind telling you, I don’t have a cat’s breath of a whisker about what’s the right way to send thanks for clearing your dead husband’s body out of your house. I suppose a plate of lemon bars and a nice card might do.

Ordinarily I’d check on my manners ideas with Cecilia Abraham. Cecilia is a regular expert on things to do with behaving right. She even has fancy words for everything. She calls politeness “etiquette”, a word she taught me how to say, but I don’t much use, since it sounds like it comes from France, and ever since I heard they don’t care for us Americans out there, I’m not too keen to sound like a Franciscan. Anyway, I’m not talking to Cecilia right now, on account of the theater.

See, Cecilia got this wild haired idea that she was going to culturalize the entire town. So she got a bunch of her gossipy girlfriends together and started a club to put on plays. Cecilia’s husband, Lewis, owns a lot of property out on the west side, and he gave them this cute old movie house for their club (Syvert started calling it the “hen house” on account of all the gossip those girls put out). They needed to get it all cleaned up and ready to put on their play shows, and it turns out that takes lots of money.

Now, Cecilia and her husband have a slew of hoity-toity rich friends, so I don’t know why they didn’t just have them all cough up some money to clean the place up, but I guess that would seem too much like begging or some such thing.

Anyway, instead of just asking for the money, this club decided they were going to put on a play in the park, and then they’d go and hit up all their snooty buddies to buy tickets and charge them some big chunk of money for the honor. I don’t remember how much it was, but I can tell you I could about buy a brand new washer and dryer for what their play tickets were costing. They made darn sure no riff-raff types like me and Syvert could afford to go to their stupid play.

Now, that was all well and good, but it just so happens they decided to put on their show in the town square – right in the place where I take my constitution every afternoon. They went and blocked off this big chunk of the green where the finest trees just happen to be – not to mention a pretty little gazebo where I like to do my leg stretches – and, to tip it off, they moved the very bench I rest on every day in the middle of my walk!

You see why Syvert couldn’t just sit by and let my life be tumbled around, just so Cecilia’s weirdo pals could trounce around in tights for her uppity friends. He was a shining knight in armor that day, I tell you.

As soon as he heard how Cecilia’s nasty play group forced me out onto the streets for my walk, he marched right on over there and gave Cecilia a good talk about how richies don’t own the town square, which belongs to all us folks that pay our taxes and not just to the ones that don’t really work for their money, and who did she think she is to be moving my bench which I count on for my walks, because there are lots of backyards and cornfields where she could diddle about like an idiot and not be out in public getting in the way of the decent people of our community.

Obviously Cecilia was not in her right mind that day, because first off she went right on about her acting, just ignoring Syvert completely until he had to haul himself up onto the gazebo and block her from moving around and talking. Then, instead of listening politely while he made his point, she got all panicky and called that chucklehead husband of hers out of the crowd. That goof Lewis came leaping to his feet so fast that his folding chair closed up and was stuck to his backside for half his run to the stage.

I wasn’t there to see it, but I know it happened, because Marybeth Brandt got smacked in the face when that chair finally let go of his behind, and I saw her at Jacobsons’ Market the next day, crying to her sister about her big bruised mug and how if not for her glasses she might of got her eye poked out.

If you ask me, more than likely she already got herself bruised up at that job of hers. She’s a fine waitress for remembering your order, but darned if the girl isn’t always bumping into things. Syvert told her the coke-bottle glasses had to go – if she just spent some of that tip money on contact lenses, instead of flushing it all away on classes at the community college, she wouldn’t have her way blocked by big old frames floating by her eyes.

You’d think when she woke up one morning and those ugly old glasses had gone from her nightstand, she would have called her eye doc up right then and had him make her some good old stay-in-your-eyes contact lenses… but no. Fool thing buys herself a new pair of glasses – cheapest kind she could get her hands on, too. Some folks just can’t take a hint.

Anyway, Mister Lewis Abraham shook that chair off his tail, then strutted up onto the gazebo like he was King of Nantucket or something. And instead of apologizing about his wife and her crooners taking over the town square, he actually started hollering at Syvert – like it was okay for Miss Cecilia to plotz around dramafying all over the place, but heaven forbid if plain old Syvert Anders might just want to have a say about that.

Poor Syvert! You shoulda seen his face when he got home. I don’t mind telling you, that’s the first time I actually got worried that he might just care too much. That big vein was popping on his forehead so far I half expected it would bust open right there in the kitchen. Just thinking back on that night makes me want to stop talking to Cecilia all over again, even though things did work themselves out in the end.

I even sent her a nice casserole for sympathy (which I wasn’t really feeling – you can imagine) when that theater building of hers burned right to the ground not two weeks after her club finished getting it all fancied up. Didn’t get so much as a thank you card back – can you believe it?

So naturally it’s not like I can just call up Cecilia and ask about the lemon bars. I did check with Sheila Murphy when she came over to help me scrub the stains off the floor in the TV room.

Bless her heart! That young woman hasn’t got the brains the good lord gave a housefly, but she knows more about getting stains out than anybody I know. I bet she even knows more than that sassy gal who’s always on channel six bragging on her special housekeeping tricks.

Well, the simpleton sure couldn’t offer me advice about the lemon bars, but she did get near all the blood scrubbed right off the boards without hardly bleaching out the wood. She’s still a little shy around me, after that time I caught her skipping through the woods holding hands with that rascal, Tommy Swenson from Finnerville.

Syvert turned her around on that issue right quick, of course. Explained to the pretty dullard about boys like Tommy and how all they ever want is just that one thing any nice girl ought to be saving for her wedding night.

Not that he was able to keep that bugger Tommy from trying his best to trick Sheila into thinking otherwise, mind you. Even had the nerve to chat up her cranky old uncle, Jacob Murphy the Third (who always makes everybody call him “the Third” like it was some big honor that his folks couldn’t think of some original name for him).

Jacob’s been Sheila’s only kin since her ma disappeared when Sheila was just a small girl. Syvert always said, and I agree, it was just as well for the child, because her worthless tramp of a ma spent more time flirting with one man or another than she did being a mother to little Sheila. Old Jacob Murphy Three only sat at home and lived on loads of family money, so he could raise up that girl a better way.

Anyhoo, that sneaky Tommy Swenson went and buttered up Jake the Third like the big turkey he is, and next thing you know, right out of the blue, Sheila shows up with this great big diamond flashing off her finger and it turns out that Swenson boy went and asked the Third for her hand.

Syvert about went round the clock when I told how that no-good vagabond was trying to dishonor that innocent young daisy-brained child, and how he even went so far as to play his falsehoods on Jake himself, who fell for the whole thing hook, line and kitchen sink.

Syvert didn’t waste a second. He went and gave Tommy a good “what for” chatting up, but Tommy just didn’t get the message. Sheila proved it the next day when she called up to ask me to work the guest book at her wedding. Of course I had to tell her yes, though it galled me to do it. Nice is nice as everybody knows. But like I said to Syvert, I was praying behind my teeth that somehow that Tommy would just disappear off the planet before he had a chance to cause that poor girl some serious hurting.

I don’t know that Syvert was even listening to me, because he just walked on out to his shop without another word, and I didn’t have time to follow him because I had to be getting to choir practice. If I realized that was the last time I’d get to see his face, I think I would have maybe called him back or something, but you just don’t see these things coming, you know? I always told him he should be more careful when he’s cleaning guns.

It was downright thoughtful of Tommy to say he was going to cancel his bachelors party after Syvert died. See, Tommy figured since Syvert was the one who came up with the idea to go on a hunting trip instead of the usual old visit to that nasty girly bar outside town (which everyone pretends not to know about, but somehow there’s always cars parked outside there –except for that time all the cars parked there kept getting their windows smashed. Almost put that sin pit out of business, ‘til they went and got a guard to stand at the door most of the night).

Anyway, Tommy was thinking maybe it wouldn’t be right to go hunting without dear Syvert. Partly because he was using a brand new gun Syvert gave him as an early wedding present. I’m the one who said he should go on with the trip – it would be a way to honor Syvert. Guess Sheila’s not too happy with me now because of that. But like I said, who can see these things coming?

Looking back, I suppose somebody shoulda thought to check Tommy’s gun, what with the way Syvert got his own head shot up from some weird blockage in the gun he was cleaning. But there was no way to tell Tommy’s gun would be gunked up the same strange way.

Now don’t look at me like that. I just told Tommy to go and have a great time. Syvert would have wanted it that way.