Good-bye, Son and Other Stories. Janet Lewis
was bright but empty. Johnnie drew a deep breath, feeling as if he had emerged from underground. What fine brisk air! He took his hat off, put it on straight, thrust his hands into his coat pockets, and proceeded past the small clean residences, each with its mowed green lawn, to the end of the block. Here he turned into a business street where there were people, autos, an occasional streetcar, and store windows. Autumnal clarity was over everything, enriched by the noonday sunshine. Above the rattle of a streetcar, when it passed, he heard the deep tooting of a freighter drawing up to the locks and shriller tootings from the tugs which convoyed it. He liked the noises of the Soo. He passed an Indian leaning against a barbershop window, and a candy kitchen from which issued a group of high school girls in short, sleeveless dresses, tight little tams on their heads. A little farther down the street he stopped at a restaurant, and, entering, hung his hat on a peg and sat down at a table near the window. A girl offered him the menu, written with indelible pencil on a piece of white paper, and he said without reading it, “Broiled whitefish and blueberry pie. And coffee.”
A white muslin curtain, very clean and fresh, protected the lower part of the window from the inspection of the street. Above that, on the glass, in letters now backward, he deciphered FOUNTAIN LUNCH AND RESTAURANT. He looked about the room and watched with amusement, for a few minutes, a boy hunched over the counter at the Fountain Lunch ogling the girl who waited on him. The recent transaction at the mortician’s had given Johnnie a queer, uneasy feeling. He shook his head slightly and drummed on the table with his finger tips. He was a short, plump man with blue eyes and white hair, which was parted down the middle of his head and cut close at the sides. His nose was blunt and his upper lip long and smooth-shaven. The stubble of his beard, unless he had just shaved, gave his pink cheeks a frosty, rimy look.
The whitefish was very good, and so was the blueberry pie. He ate slowly, enjoying himself deliberately, but the idea of the mortician and of his purchase persisted.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said to himself. “No sir, it was a mistake—too much like asking for something that you don’t want.” He took a sip of coffee and said, “Well, it’s the last time I do anything like that. Next time I’ll leave it to the other fellow.” He chuckled at his joke.
The girl who came to clear the table paused a minute.
“How’s everything down at the island, Mr. Plows?”
“Fine,” he said, “just fine.”
He had more than enough time in which to walk down to the Johnstone Slip and catch the Neon, which would take him home. He went around to the stationer’s and bought himself some magazines. The boy who waited on him said, “Nice day, Mr. Plows. How’s everything down at the island?”
“Fine and dandy,” said Johnnie.
A couple of young men were standing before a hardware store window inspecting the hunting apparatus on view there. Johnnie stood with them for a few minutes, but the stuffed head of a moose regarded him with a glassy eye above the Winchesters and game bags, and he wandered on. He stopped in front of a jeweler’s, a little place with only one show window. An array of gaily enameled cigarette lighters pleased him, and he said to himself, “Why don’t you get one, Johnnie? Be a sport, you’re only young once. Treat yourself.”
He bought a blue one and then walked down to the river. The Neon lay in the slip along with a small fast boat of the United States Coast Guard service. She was a fairly large launch with a closed-in engine room and a covered deck at the stern. Her owner, who was also chief mate and engineer, was sitting on a barrel on the wharf in the shade of the warehouses. He hopped off as Johnnie approached and greeted him.
“Have a nice day?” he said.
“First rate,” said Johnnie. “When do we go?”
“Oh, any time the mail comes. I guess there’s nobody else coming down with us.”
“Well, let’s climb on board and have a smoke,” said Johnnie. “I brought you some funny pictures.”
A coolness rose from the water, sharply pleasant in the warmth of the air. The surface of the water was sprinkled with a sooty dust, with chips and straws, and undulated slightly. The young man seated himself in a camp chair, leaning against the cabin wall and bracing his feet against the railing. He was lean and dark, a French-Canadian type. He took the magazines which Johnnie offered him and spread them out lazily on his knee, meanwhile looking up the green hill toward the road, or at the blackened wooden walls of the slip, or at the sunlight on the deck.
Johnnie got out his lighter and lit his cigar with ostentation.
The boy said, “Pretty swell you’re getting, Johnnie.”
Johnnie smirked, capped the tiny flame, and put the instrument back in his pocket with a great air of ownership. The boy laughed. The mail came, and they started the engine and chugged out into the Straits.
The air freshened immediately. There was a good icy nip to it in spite of the sun. Freighters were coming upstream, some with a tow, and freighters were starting downstream. The low, deep throbbing of their engines sounded across the water. A ferryboat was crossing from the Canadian Sault, and the Laurentians were blue. It was very beautiful, this scene of distant busyness, and as Johnnie looked at it, it drew him into a reverie in which it seemed that he would never again see these boats, this water, and that he should look at them well. When he awoke from this reverie his light had gone out. They were well down in Hay Lake, and the boy stood at the door of the cabin, propped inside the frame of it, where he could keep one hand on the tiller rope.
Johnnie looked ruefully at the end of his cigar, then, seeing his companion watching him, smiled, and drew the blue lighter from his pocket. The little flame blazed up, the rolled leaves of tobacco caught, and Johnnie smirked again as he put out the light. The boy grinned.
“That sure is swell, Johnnie. When you die, leave it to me, will you?”
“Take it now,” said Johnnie imperatively. “Great snakes, I bought it for you anyway. It’s a present. You’re a friend of mine. Can’t I buy you a present?”
The boy was pleased but apologetic. He took the blue lighter and fingered it lovingly from time to time, through the rest of the afternoon.
They reached Encampment at dark. The Neon let Johnnie off at the store, his store, and went on downriver to the post office. There was a light in the store, and another in the small kitchen behind it. As he approached the back door he caught a glimpse of Martha Waley, the woman who helped him with the store and kept house for him. She smiled at him over her shoulder as he came in.
“Hello, Johnnie,” she said. “Have a nice day?” and, without waiting for an answer, “Sue Tolliver just came into the store. Go on and ask her what she wants. I got supper on the stove and I don’t want to spoil it.”
He put his hat and bundle of magazines on the kitchen table and went into the front room. Behind the counter stood the little Tolliver girl, her sweater buttoned high about her neck and her straight pale hair straggling down into her eyes.
Johnnie said, “Well, little lady, what can I give you?”
She consulted a small piece of crumpled paper and said, “Matches, soap, bacon.”
“What kind of soap?” said Johnnie, setting a box of matches on the counter. It was cozy in the store with all the rows of breakfast foods, oatmeal, canned goods. A shelf of jams and pickles in glass jars behind Johnnie’s back was particularly enticing. The oil lamp stood on the glass top of the candy counter. The child shook her head at the question.
“Kitchen soap,” she suggested.
“I’ll make it Lily White,” said Johnnie. “That’s the kind your ma generally gets. Here, now, don’t go putting them things in your pockets. I’m going to wrap ’em up for you.” The child put them back on the counter sheepishly.
“Lookit,” he said. He stacked them deftly on the slab of bacon, unrolled a fair sheet of brown paper, wrapped everything, mitered the corners neatly, tied