Dad's plan was to keep the Mississippi River on
our right side and try to be in the vicinity of
Chester, Illinois, by nightfall. We made good time
on dry roads south from Dupo and didn't have our
first flat until very near Waterloo. In all, we
did pretty well with only four flats that day, one
in each tire. But it seemed like the Ford was on
a jack more than it was on the road. We pumped the
tires up by hand. The last sign we saw for free
air was outside Columbia.
The little boys needed a steady flow of water from
the bottles we'd brought. This made for endless
stops at the side of the road. This was a strictly
men-only expedition, so we occasionally all four
stood in a row over a ditch when the road was empty
both directions. An hour of driving would pass before
we'd see another car.
We'd pull up by open pasture and drop a ruler into
the tank to gauge the gas level. The tank was set
in right under the front seats, so it was like riding
a bomb, though I never heard of one going off. On
our stops, the boys could run wild in the field,
wrestling and tussling and mauling each other like
puppies. I couldn't remember being that age.
While we were watching them, Dad said, "Twins
run in families and tend to skip a generation."
"Was your dad a twin?"
"My mother and her brother are twins. You'll
meet Noah. They all live together in the homeplace.
My dad and mother and my aunt and uncle. People
lived however they could in years past, sharing
out what they had. Seemed like most of my dad's
patients paid him in fish out of the river and vegetables
out of their gardens. A doctor doesn't get rich
in Grand Tower."
"So you had four parents," I said.
"In a manner of speaking I did." Dad
watched the boys. "It wasn't a bad way to grow
up. They taught me how to make do, and to keep private
business private. Pretty good lessons."
Down around Red Bud the ruts were deeper, and there
was more standing water. We were getting father
into Southern Illinois, the territory they call
Egypt for some reason. The farms were hardscrabble
yellow clay. They plowed around trees growing clumped
in the middles of fields. Two or three hills were
so steep that we had to turn the Ford around and
go up in reverse. So when the sun was getting down
in the west, it was time to call it a day.
Two things my dad mistrusted: water from an unfamiliar
well and all hotel rooms on the Illinois side of
the river. He could give you a short and sweet scientific
description of the common bedbug that made you happy
to spend the night on the same car seat you'd bounced
along on all day.
We pulled off the road just at dusk and built a
little campfire. The boys found sticks to roast
wienies on. Now we were early explorers, of the
Lewis and Clark party, sitting cross-legged around
the wilderness fire. Dad sat just out of the glow
on the running board. With any luck, we'd be in
Grand Tower tomorrow night by this time.
He must have wondered what the place would look
like to us city boys who until today had thought
the whole world was paved.
"There never was a lot to Grand Tower,"
he said, "though it showed some progress after
the war. When I was a boy, they had a saddle factory,
a cigar plant, a gunsmith shop or two, a brick works.
Enos Walker started a sawmill that peeled logs and
made strips for splint baskets. My uncle Noah worked
there for years."
The little boys' eyes were glazing over. "But
it's not much more than a ghost town now,"
Dad remarked.
This alerted the boys. They looked around with
big eyes. The trees were black with night, and now
they noticed where they were. "A ghost town
isn't quite the same thing as a ghost," Dad
said. But seeing he had their full attention, he
added, "Of course, every little old town had
a haunt or two."
From back in the trees came the rushing of some
night bird's wings. The rusty creak of a turning
windpump sounded across the darkness.
"There's a hill over the town called the Devil's
Backbone," Dad said.
Ghosts and now the devil. He had us in the palm
of his hand.
"The house where I grew up straddles the Backbone
about halfway along. Now a road runs between the
Backbone and the river. A ghost or something very
like it has been seen crossing that road on dark
nights like this."
I suspected Dad was playing up the story for us,
but it worked on me like a charm. The boys were
about in each other's laps.
"It's a woman," Dad said, " in old-time
skirts with gray hair streaming down her back. She'll
dart out in the road, running hard, making for the
river, where she seems to throw herself in. It's
been reported for years. Any number of horses have
shied, and buggies turned over. There are people
who won't go down that road after dark."
Steadying my voice, I said, "Dad, did you
ever see…anything?"
"Not me." He stood up, working the kinks
out of his back. "You know how these old stories
grow in the telling." But then he added, "I
don't know what my mother thought. I know she didn't
like to hear talk about that particular ghost. Too
close to home, I suppose."
Then we were all too sleepy to make it through
another moment. We pulled up the roof of the Ford
and rolled the boys in car rugs to settle them on
the backseat. They were joyous at turning in for
the first time in their lives with dirty faces and
necks. Dad drifted off, sitting bolt upright behind
the wheel with his necktie in place. The rusty sound
of the distant windpump turned in my dreams until
daylight.
We made it to Grand Tower by the next afternoon,
though we'd overheated at Rockwood. The road nearly
played out past Fountain Bluff. Then we were coming
down a last hill, above the town, steeping like
tea in the deep summer damp.
Above the town Dad pointed out a long, sharp-backed
hill as the Devil's Backbone. Across the river on
the Missouri side another stone outcropping rose
straight out of the water. This was Tower Rock,
and it gave the town its name, Dad said.
The whole heat-hazed place looked as old as the
rocks it nestled among. It didn't seem likely to
me that anybody had ever been young here.
We drove up the Backbone as near to the house as
we could get. I remember it now like a moving-picture
show of that time, without sound and all in black
and white.
I see the little old lady on the porch with her
hands in her apron. Grandma Tilly: a tiny face wrinkled
like a walnut, and wisps of hair drawn back in a
knot. Behind her apron she's slender as a girl,
and there's something young about her. She dances
with the pleasure of seeing Dad stride up the hill.
To her, he's "young Bill," we're young
Bill's boys. She's been waiting for this moment.
Behind her in a rocker is her husband, older than
she is, ancient. Waxy with age, trapped by the years
and his chair, but alive behind his eyes. He has
a shock of fine white hair and a curling, somehow
military mustache. He wears a once-ivory alpaca
suit in this stifling afternoon, and a high collar
under his chins. He's too old to stand, but his
loose-boned, veiny hand comes out to Dad, and his
eyes are wet.
The camera of my memory ducks under the tin-roofed
porch and enters the house as everybody did, through
the kitchen door. A black iron range stands before
the old open hearth. A door to the hall shows the
way upstairs. There are big square bedrooms above,
smelling of old times, and the old. A big chest
of drawers stands in the upstairs hall. Beyond it
in the best room that looks out on the river is
Dad's aunt Delphine, in a four-poster bed.
The room hangs in lavender scent. It's so crowded
with things, you could miss a smaller woman in the
bed. But my great-aunt is very stout. Her hands,
restless on the turned-back sheet, look like little
pillows. Rings are embedded in her fingers. She's
propped below a picture on the wall of a man with
yellow hair in an old-fashioned costume.
She turns startling violet eyes on us. Under her
beribboned bed cap, he black hair is in ringlets
like a girl's. She had a faint mustache. When she
sees my dad, her plump hands fly to her mouth, and
the tears flow in dark streaks down her face.
In the moving picture memory makes, Great-uncle
Noah is under the window of his wife's room, weeding
one-handed in the heat of the day. But that can't
be. The garden ran down from the far side of the
house, and Uncle Noah would have been on the porch
with his sister Tilly to greet us. He was certainly
there on the day we left-only a little bent over,
in his shirtsleeves, one of them pinned up above
the missing arm.
In the first moments of our visit, even the little
boys were all eyes. They'd been promised snakes
around the woodshed and catfish they could catch
themselves. They'd banked on shoeless days and bathless
nights. But just for a moment they were caught in
the grip of this place. They felt the weight of
its history, and mystery.
So did I. The paper was loose and peeling on the
walls. I wondered how many layers you'd have to
scrape away until you came to the time when these
old people were young. If they ever were.
I wondered how quiet you'd have to be to hear the
voices of those times.
