The Ghost of a Model T: And Other Stories

  Grumbling, he moved the chair out into that portion of the lawn that had been cut. The mower, rolling past, chortled at him fiendishly.

  “Some day,” Gramp told it, “I’m going to take a swipe at you and bust a gear or two.”

  The mower hooted at him and went serenely down the lawn.

  From somewhere down the grassy street came a jangling of metal, a stuttered coughing.

  Gramp, ready to sit down, straightened up and listened.

  The sound came more clearly, the rumbling backfire of a balky engine, the clatter of loose metallic parts.

  “An automobile!” yelped Gramp. “An automobile, by cracky!”

  He started to gallop for the gate, suddenly remembered that he was feeble and subsided to a rapid hobble.

  “Must be that crazy Ole Johnson,” he told himself. “He’s the only one left that’s got a car. Just too dadburned stubborn to give it up.”

  It was Ole.

  Gramp reached the gate in time to see the rusty, dilapidated old machine come bumping around the corner, rocking and chugging along the unused street. Steam hissed from the overheated radiator and a cloud of blue smoke issued from the exhaust, which had lost its muffler five years or more ago.

  Ole sat stolidly behind the wheel, squinting his eyes, trying to duck the roughest places, although that was hard to do, for weeds and grass had overrun the streets and it was hard to see what might be underneath them.

  Gramp waved his cane.

  “Hi, Ole,” he shouted.

  Ole pulled up, setting the emergency brake. The car gasped, shuddered, coughed, died with a horrible sigh.

  “What you burning?” asked Gramp.

  “Little bit of everything,” said Ole. “Kerosene, some old tractor oil I found out in a barrel, some rubbing alcohol.”

  Gramp regarded the fugitive machine with forthright admiration. “Them was the days,” he said. “Had one myself used to be able to get a hundred miles an hour out of.”

  “Still O.K.,” said Ole, “if you only could find the stuff to run them or get the parts to fix them. Up to three, four years ago I used to be able to get enough gasoline, but ain’t seen none for a long time now. Quit making it, I guess. No use having gasoline, they tell me, when you have atomic power.”

  “Sure,” said Gramp. “Guess maybe that’s right, but you can’t smell atomic power. Sweetest thing I know, the smell of burning gasoline. These here helicopters and other gadgets they got took all the romance out of traveling, somehow.”

  He squinted at the barrels and baskets piled in the back seat.

  “Got some vegetables?” he asked.

  “Yup,” said Ole. “Some sweet corn and early potatoes and a few baskets of tomatoes. Thought maybe I could sell them.”

  Gramp shook his head. “You won’t, Ole. They won’t buy them. Folks has got the notion that this new hydroponics stuff is the only garden sass that’s fit to eat. Sanitary, they say, and better flavored.”

  “Wouldn’t give a hoot in a tin cup for all they grow in them tanks they got,” Ole declared, belligerently. “Don’t taste right to me, somehow. Like I tell Martha, food’s got to be raised in the soil to have any character.”

  He reached down to turn over the ignition switch.

  “Don’t know as it’s worth trying to get the stuff to town,” he said, “the way they keep the roads. Or the way they don’t keep them, rather. Twenty years ago the state highway out there was a strip of good concrete and they kept it patched and plowed it every winter. Did anything, spent any amount of money to keep it open. And now they just forgot about it. The concrete’s all broken up and some of it has washed out. Brambles are growing in it. Had to get out and cut away a tree that fell across it one place this morning.”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” agreed Gramp.

  The car exploded into life, coughing and choking. A cloud of dense blue smoke rolled out from under it. With a jerk it stirred to life and lumbered down the road.

  Gramp clumped back to his chair and found it dripping wet. The automatic mower, having finished its cutting job, had rolled out the hose, was sprinkling the lawn.

  Muttering venom, Gramp stalked around the corner of the house and sat down on the bench beside the back porch. He didn’t like to sit there, but it was the only place he was safe from the hunk of machinery out in the front.

  For one thing, the view from the bench was slightly depressing, fronting as it did on street after street of vacant, deserted houses and weed-grown, unkempt yards.

  It had one advantage, however. From the bench he could pretend he was slightly deaf and not hear the twitch music the radio was blaring out.

  A voice called from the front yard.

  “Bill! Bill, where be you?”

  Gramp twisted around.

  “Here I am, Mark. Back of the house. Hiding from that dadburned mower.”

  Mark Bailey limped around the corner of the house, cigarette threatening to set fire to his bushy whiskers.

  “Bit early for the game, ain’t you?” asked Gramp.

  “Can’t play no game today,” said Mark.

  He hobbled over and sat down beside Gramp on the bench.

  “We’re leaving,” he said.

  Gramp whirled on him. “You’re leaving!”

  “Yeah. Moving out into the country. Lucinda finally talked Herb into it. Never gave him no peace, I guess. Said everyone was moving away to one of them nice country estates and she didn’t see no reason why we couldn’t.”

  Gramp gulped. “Where to?”

  “Don’t rightly know,” said Mark. “Ain’t been there myself. Up north some place. Up on one of the lakes. Got ten acres of land. Lucinda wanted a hundred, but Herb put down his foot and said ten was enough. After all, one city lot was enough for all these years.”

  “Betty was pestering Johnny, too,” said Gramp, “but he’s holding out against her. Says he simply can’t do it. Says it wouldn’t look right, him the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce and all, if he went moving away from the city.”

  “Folks are crazy,” Mark declared. “Plumb crazy.”

  “That’s a fact,” Gramp agreed. “Country crazy, that’s what they are. Look across there.”

  He waved his hand at the streets of vacant houses. “Can remember the time when those places were as pretty a bunch of homes as you ever laid your eyes on. Good neighbors, they were. Women ran across from one back door to another to trade recipes. And the men folks would go out to cut the grass and pretty soon the mowers would all be sitting idle and the men would be ganged up, chewing the fat. Friendly people, Mark. But look at it now.”

  Mark stirred uneasily. “Got to be getting back, Bill. Just sneaked over to let you know we were lighting out. Lucinda’s got me packing. She’d be sore if she knew I’d run out.”

  Gramp rose stiffly and held out his hand. “I’ll be seeing you again? You be over for one last game?”

  Mark shook his head. “Afraid not, Bill.”

  They shook hands awkwardly, abashed. “Sure will miss them games,” said Mark.

  “Me, too,” said Gramp. “I won’t have nobody once you’re gone.”

  “So long, Bill,” said Mark.

  “So long,” said Gramp.

  He stood and watched his friend hobble around the house, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneliness. The loneliness of age—of age and the outdated. Fiercely, Gramp admitted it. He was outdated. He belonged to another age. He had outstripped his time, lived beyond his years.

  Eyes misty, he fumbled for the cane that lay against the bench, slowly made his way toward the sagging gate that opened onto the deserted street back of the house.

  The years had moved too fast. Years that had brought the family plane and helicopter, leaving the auto to rust in some forgotten place, th
e unused roads to fall into disrepair. Years that had virtually wiped out the tilling of the soil with the rise of hydroponics. Years that had brought cheap land with the disappearance of the farm as an economic unit, had sent city people scurrying out into the country where each man, for less than the price of a city lot, might own broad acres. Years that had revolutionized the construction of homes to a point where families simply walked away from their old homes to the new ones that could be bought, custom-made, for less than half the price of a prewar structure and could be changed at small cost, to accommodate need of additional space or merely a passing whim.

  Gramp sniffed. Houses that could be changed each year, just like one would shift around the furniture. What kind of living was that?

  He plodded slowly down the dusty path that was all that remained of what a few years before had been a busy residential street. A street of ghosts, Gramp told himself—of furtive, little ghosts that whispered in the night. Ghosts of playing children, ghosts of upset tricycles and canted coaster wagons. Ghosts of gossiping housewives. Ghosts of shouted greetings. Ghosts of flaming fireplaces and chimneys smoking of a winter night.

  Little puffs of dust rose around his feet and whitened the cuffs of his trousers.

  There was the old Adams place across the way. Adams had been mighty proud of it, he remembered. Gray field stone front and picture windows. Now the stone was green with creeping moss and the broken windows gaped with ghastly leer. Weeds choked the lawn and blotted out the stoop. An elm tree was pushing its branches against the gable. Gramp could remember the day Adams had planted that elm tree.

  For a moment he stood there in the grass-grown street, feet in the dust, both hands clutching the curve of his cane, eyes closed.

  Through the fog of years he heard the cry of playing children, the barking of Conrad’s yapping pooch from down the street. And there was Adams, stripped to the waist, plying the shovel, scooping out the hole, with the elm tree, roots wrapped in burlap, lying on the lawn.

  May, 1946. Forty-four years ago. Just after he and Adams had come home from the war together.

  Footsteps padded in the dust and Gramp, startled, opened his eyes.

  Before him stood a young man. A man of thirty, perhaps. Maybe a bit less.

  “Good morning,” said Gramp.

  “I hope,” said the young man, “that I didn’t startle you.”

  “You saw me standing here,” asked Gramp, “like a danged fool, with my eyes shut?”

  The young man nodded.

  “I was remembering,” said Gramp.

  “You live around here?”

  “Just down the street. The last one in this part of the city.”

  “Perhaps you can help me then.”

  “Try me,” said Gramp.

  The young man stammered. “Well, you see, it’s like this. I’m on a sort of … well, you might call it a sentimental pilgrimage –”

  “I understand,” said Gramp. “So am I.”

  “My name is Adams,” said the young man. “My grandfather used to live around here somewhere. I wonder –”

  “Right over there,” said Gramp.

  Together they stood and stared at the house.

  “It was a nice place once,” Gramp told him. “Your granddaddy planted that tree, right after he came home from the war. I was with him when we marched into Berlin. That was a day for you –”

  “It’s a pity,” said young Adams. “A pity –”

  But Gramp didn’t seem to hear him. “Your granddaddy?” he asked. “I seem to have lost track of him.”

  “He’s dead,” said young Adams.

  “He was messed up with atomic power,” said Gramp.

  “That’s right,” said Adams proudly. “He and my Dad got into it early.”

  John J. Webster was striding up the broad stone steps of the city hall when the walking scarecrow carrying a rifle under his arm caught up with him and stopped him.

  “Howdy, Mr. Webster,” said the scarecrow.

  Webster stared, then recognition crinkled his face.

  “It’s Levi,” he said. “How are things going, Levi?”

  Levi Lewis grinned with snagged teeth. “Fair to middling. Gardens are coming along and the young rabbits are getting to be good eating.”

  “You aren’t getting mixed up in any of the hell raising that’s being laid to the houses?” asked Webster.

  “No, sir,” declared Levi. “Ain’t none of us Squatters mixed up in any wrongdoing. We’re law-abiding God-fearing people, we are. Only reason we’re there is we can’t make a living no place else. And us living in them places other people up and left ain’t harming no one. Police are just blaming us for the thievery and other things that’s going on, knowing we can’t protect ourselves. They’re making us the goats.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” said Webster. “The chief wants to burn the houses.”

  “If he tries that,” said Levi, “he’ll run against something he ain’t counting on. They run us off our farms with this tank farming of theirs but they ain’t going to run us any farther.”

  He spat across the steps.

  “Wouldn’t happen you might have some jingling money on you?” he asked. “I’m fresh out of cartridges and with them rabbits coming up –”

  Webster thrust his fingers into a vest pocket, pulled out a half dollar.

  Levi grinned. “That’s obliging of you, Mr. Webster. I’ll bring a mess of squirrels, come fall.”

  The Squatter touched his hat with two fingers and retreated down the steps, sun glinting on the rifle barrel. Webster turned up the steps again.

  The city council session already was in full swing when he walked into the chamber.

  Police Chief Jim Maxwell was standing by the table and Mayor Paul Carter was talking.

  “Don’t you think you may be acting a bit hastily, Jim, in urging such a course of action with the houses?”

  “No, I don’t,” declared the chief. “Except for a couple of dozen or so, none of those houses are occupied by their rightful owners, or rather, their original owners. Every one of them belongs to the city now through tax forfeiture. And they are nothing but an eyesore and a menace. They have no value. Not even salvage value. Wood? We don’t use wood any more. Plastics are better. Stone? We use steel instead of stone. Not a single one of those houses have any material of marketable value.

  “And in the meantime they are becoming the haunts of petty criminals and undesirable elements. Grown up with vegetation as the residential sections are, they make a perfect hideout for all types of criminals. A man commits a crime and heads straight for the houses—once there he’s safe, for I could send a thousand men in there and he could elude them all.

  “They aren’t worth the expense of tearing down. And yet they are, if not a menace, at least a nuisance. We should get rid of them and fire is the cheapest, quickest way. We’d use all precautions.”

  “What about the legal angle?” asked the mayor.

  “I checked into that. A man has a right to destroy his own property in any way he may see fit so long as it endangers no one else’s. The same law, I suppose, would apply to a municipality.”

  Alderman Thomas Griffin sprang to his feet.

  “You’d alienate a lot of people,” he declared. “You’d be burning down a lot of old homesteads. People still have some sentimental attachments –”

  “If they cared for them,” snapped the chief, “why didn’t they pay the taxes and take care of them? Why did they go running off to the country, just leaving the houses standing. Ask Webster here. He can tell you what success he had trying to interest the people in their ancestral homes.”

  “You’re talking about that Old Home Week farce,” said Griffin. “Webster spread it on so thick they gagged on it. That’s what a Chamber of Commerce mentality always does. People resent having th
e things they set some store by being used as bait to bring more business into town.”

  Alderman Forrest King leaped up and pounded on the table, his double chin quaking with rage.

  “I’m sick and tired of you taking a crack at the Chamber every chance you get,” he yelled. “When you do that you’re taking a slap at every business in this city. And the business houses are all this city has left. They’re the only ones paying taxes any more.”

  Griffin grinned sourly. “Mr. King, I can appreciate your position as president of the Chamber.”

  “You went broke yourself,” snarled King. “That’s the reason you act the way you do. You lost your shirt at business and now you’re sore at business –”

  “King, you’re crude,” said Griffin.

  A silence fell upon the room, a cold, embarrassed silence.

  Griffin broke it. “I am taking no slap at business. I am protesting the persistence of business in sticking to outmoded ideas and methods. The day of go-getting is over, gentlemen. The day of high pressure is gone forever. Ballyhoo is something that is dead and buried.

  “The day when you could have tall-corn days or dollar days or dream up some fake celebration and deck the place up with bunting and pull in big crowds that were ready to spend money is past these many years. Only you fellows don’t seem to know it.

  “The success of such stunts as that was its appeal to mob psychology and civic loyalty. You can’t have civic loyalty with a city dying on its feet. You can’t appeal to mob psychology when there is no mob—when every man, or nearly every man has the solitude of forty acres.”

  “Gentlemen,” pleaded the mayor. “Gentlemen, this is distinctly out of order.”

  King sputtered into life, walloped the table once again.

  “No, let’s have it out. Webster is over there. Perhaps he can tell us what he thinks.”

  Webster stirred uncomfortably. “I scarcely believe,” he said, “I have anything to say.”

  “Forget it,” snapped Griffin and sat down.

  But King still stood, his face crimson, his mouth trembling with anger.