Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

So why write a whole novel? (Well, there are other reasons.) Other writers can say this much about a time and a place: the way that time and place create the people in them, the way those people (eccentrically, clumsily, caringly) create that time and place. Two nights ago I went to a Chekhov play; Chekhov could.

It is always worth remarking when a writer has done this. It is doubly worth remarking when he has done it with economy and grace.

Here is a story where Avram Davidson has, and has. Remark it.

ABOUT A HUNDRED YEARS ago a man named Vanderhorn built the little house. He built it one and a half stories high, with attached and detached sheds snuggling around it as usual; and he covered it with clapboards cut at his own mill — he had a small sawmill down at the creek, Mr. Vanderhorn did. After that he lived in the little house with his daughter and her husband (being a widower man) and one day he died there. So the daughter and son-in-law, a Mr. Hooten or Wooten or whatever it was, they came into his money which he made out of musket stocks for the Civil War, and they built a big new house next to the old one, only further back from the street. This Mr. Wooten or Hooten or something like that, he didn’t have any sons, either; and his son-in-law turned the sawmill into a buggy factory. Well, you know what happened to that business! Finally, a man named Carmichael, who made milk wagons and baggage carts and piewagons, he bought the whole Vanderhorn estate. He fixed up the big house and put in apartments, and finally he sold it to my father and went out of business. Moved away somewhere.

I was just a little boy when we moved in. My sister was a lot older. The old Vanderhorn house wasn’t part of the property any more. A lady named Mrs. Grummick was living there and Mr. Carmichael had sold her all the property the width of her house from the street on back to the next lot which faced the street behind ours. I heard my father say it was one of the narrowest lots in the city, and it was separated from ours by a picket fence. In the front of the old house was an old weeping willow tree and a big lilac bush like a small tree. In back were a truck garden and a few flowerbeds. Mrs. Grummick’s house was so near to our property that I could look right into her window, and one day I did, and she was sorting beans.

Mrs. Grummick looked out and smiled at me. She had one of those broad faces with high cheekbones, and when she smiled her little bright black eyes almost disappeared.

“Liddle boy, hello!” she said. I said Hello and went right on staring, and she went right on sorting her beans. On her head was a kerchief (you have to remember that this was before they became fashionable) and there was a tiny gold earring in each plump earlobe. The beans were in two crocks on the table and in a pile in front of her. She was moving them around and sorting them into little groups. There were more crocks on the shelves, and glass jars, and bundles of herbs and strings of onions and peppers and bunches of garlic all hanging around the room. I looked through the room and out the window facing the street and there was a sign in front of the little house, hanging on a sort of one-armed gallows. Anastasia Grummick, Midwife, it said.

“What’s a midwife?” I asked her.

“Me,” she said. And she went on pushing the beans around, lining them up in rows, taking some from one place and putting them in another.

“Have you got any children, Mrs. Grimmick?”

“One. I god one boy. Big boy.” She laughed.

“Where is he?”

“I think he come home today. I know he come home today.” Her head bobbed.

“How do you know?”

“I know because I know. He come home and I make a bean soup for him. You want go errand for me?”

“All right.” She stood up and pulled a little change purse out of her apron pocket, and counted out some money and handed it to me out of the window.

“Tell butcher Mrs. Grummick want him to cut some meat for a bean soup. He knows. Mrs. Schloutz. And you ged iche-cream comb with nickel, for you.”

I started to go, but she gave me another nickel. “Ged two iche-cream combs. I ead one, too.” She laughed. “One, too. One, two, three — Oh, Englisht languish!” Then she went back to the table, put part of the beans back in the crocks, and swept the rest of them into her apron. I got the meat for her and ate my French vanilla and then went off to play.

A few hours later a taxicab stopped in front of the little gray house and a man got out of it. A big fellow. Of course, to a kid, all grownups are real big, but he was very big — tremendous, he was, across, but not so tall. Mrs. Grummick came to the door.

“Eddie!” she said. And they hugged and kissed, so I decided this was her son, even before he called her “Mom.”

“Mom,” he said, “do I smell bean soup?”

“Just for you I make it,” she said.

He laughed. “You knew I was coming, huh? You been reading them old beans again, Mom?” And they went into the house together.

I went home, thinking. My mother was doing something over the washtub with a ball of bluing. “Mama,” I said, “can a person read beans?”

“Did you take your milk of magnesia?” my mother asked. Just as if I hadn’t spoken. “Did you?”

I decided to bluff it out. “Uh-huh,” I said.

“Oh no you didn’t. Get me a spoon.”

“Well, why do you ask if you ain’t going to believe me?”

“Open up,” she ordered. “More. Swallow it. Take the rest. All of it. If you could see your face! Suppose it froze and stayed like that? Go and wash the spoon off.”

Next morning Eddie was down in the far end of the garden with a hoe. He had his shirt off. Talk about shoulders! Talk about arms! Talk about a chest! My mother was out in front of our house, which made her near Eddie’s mother out in back of hers. Of course my mother had to know everybody’s business.

“That your son, Mrs. Grummick?”

“My son, yes.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“Rachel.”

“No, I mean your son … what does he do…”

“He rachel. All over country. I show you.”

She showed us a picture of a man in trunks with a hood over his head. “The Masked Marvel! Wrestling’s Greatest Mystery!” The shoulders, arms, and chest — they could only have been Eddie’s. There were other pictures of him in bulging poses, with names like, oh, The Slav Slayer, Chief Thunderwing, Young Kehoe, and so on. Every month Eddie Grummick sent his mother another photograph. It was the only kind of letter he sent because she didn’t know how to read English. Or any other language, for that matter.

Back in the vegetable patch Eddie started singing a very popular song at that time, called “I Faw Down And Go Boom! ”

It was a hot summer that year, a long hot summer, and September was just as hot as July. One shimmering, blazing day Mrs. Grummick called my father over. He had his shirt off and was sitting under our tree in his BVD top. We were drinking lemonade.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “we used to make lemonade with brown sugar and sell it in the streets. We used to call out

“People used to think that was pretty funny.”

Mrs. Grummick called out: “Hoo-hoo! Mister! Hoo-hoo!”

“Guess she wants me .” my father said. He went across the lawn. “Yes ma’am …” he was saying. “Yes ma’am.”

She asked, “You buy coal yed, mister?”