Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Outside Hattie’s in the dark mid-December gray of first light, a new banner was being strung, and Cass, behind the lunch counter, paused to see what this new one would say. Recent banners had not brought much luck. Bath had not trounced Schuyler Springs. They had not beaten Schuyler Springs. Indeed, Bath had not been in the game, and the Schuyler Springs Sentinel had again run an editorial suggesting that Bath be dropped from the Schuyler schedule on humanitarian grounds. People were none too sure things were looking ↑ in Bath, either. A rumor had recently begun to circulate that the Sans Souci would not reopen in the summer as planned, and there was new trouble with The Ultimate Escape. Opposition had arisen in the form of a group concerned that the new Bath cemetery on the outskirts of town would be uprooted, the eternal rest of its inhabitants disturbed. So far the group consisted of no more than a handful of residents whose attempts to draw attention to its cause had been unsuccessful in their own community. The North Bath Weekly Journal had failed to cover their maiden protest in front of the demonic clown billboard. Predictably, the Schuyler Sentinel , ever alert to the possibility of humiliating its onetime rival and current straw opponent, had covered the protest in a small article in the back section of the weekend edition and since then had run three more articles on the ensuing “controversy,” each longer than the previous, each inching closer to section A. The interest raised by the Sentinel articles had forced the North Bath Weekly Journal to run a stern editorial suggesting that Schuyler Springs, which had its racetrack and its baths and its summer theater and concert series, should stay out of its less fortunate sister city’s affairs, quit trying to torpedo its long-awaited and much-deserved good fortune. The living residents of Bath needed this economic shot in the arm, the Journal said, so let the dead bury the dead. More important, the land designated for the new cemetery had never been suitable for a burial site, the ground being far too boggy. Last spring, after several days of heavy rain, a plot had been backhoed only to discover that the ground beneath already contained an occupant. The casket had migrated several feet from where it was supposed to be located and was no longer precisely beneath the gravestone that marked it, though another casket was. It was feared that the entire regiment of caskets planted since the new cemetery opened ten years earlier, row upon row of them, was slowly marching toward the freeway at the rate of an inch or two a month. Face it, the editorial said, all these dead people were already on the move. Better to dig them up now while they were still more or less where they were supposed to be, before they reached the sea. The Journal urged the establishment of a commission to find another cemetery site.

At the front door of the diner, after letting himself in, Sully stared at the new banner, trying to draw the words into focus, NEW ENGLAND HOLY DAYS, it seemed to say.

“Holy Days?”

Sully looked again. “Holly Days,” he corrected.

“Neither one makes much sense, does it,” Cass said, “since this isn’t New England.”

“Well, we’re only thirty miles from Vermont,” Sully reminded her, closing the door behind him and locking it again.

“Seems like more, doesn’t it,” she said. “How come their towns look like postcards?”

“Want me to get the old girl?” Sully said, seeing that Hattie was not in her booth.

When Cass did not answer, Sully took this for a yes. It was becoming clear to him that gathering the old woman from the apartment in the rear of the diner and getting her settled in her booth for the long morning was one of his duties. Otherwise, Cass was perversely content to let her mother pound on the apartment door with her bony fists. Hattie had been instructed not to try to come into the diner by herself because the passageway between the apartment and the diner had a step and she needed help to negotiate this, but if the old woman felt that she was being left alone too long in the apartment she felt no compunction about bellowing at the top of her voice and banging on the door until her arthritic hands swelled grotesquely. Then she sat in her booth and chewed Anacin tablets all morning for the pain. “Let her bang,” Cass always advised, but Sully knew it was better to fetch the old woman, make her happy and comfortable in her booth. He also suspected that Cass appreciated his accomplishing this task, that it was a small vacation from the larger burden of her constant responsibility. Cass also enjoyed the few minutes she had in the dark diner by herself before her early morning customers arrived when she opened at six-thirty.

Old Hattie, who couldn’t hear much of anything else, always heard Sully when he came to get her. Either that or she felt the vibration of his heavy footfalls in the passageway, because when Sully poked his head into the dark living room of the apartment, the old woman was always in the process of struggling to her feet. “Hello, old woman,” he said this morning. “I see you’re still kickin’.”

“Still kickin’.” Hattie grinned fiercely, righting herself with the aid of the sofa arm and extending a bony elbow to him.

“Ready for another hard day’s work?” He took her arm and steadied himself for her added weight. Hattie couldn’t weigh more than eighty-five pounds, but he’d learned quickly that eighty-five pounds was enough to cause him to lose his own balance, especially this early, before his knee loosened up.

“Hard day’s work!” Hattie echoed, latching onto him with her claws.

“Wait a second,” Sully said, trying to unfasten her talons. “Get on my good side. Every morning we go through this. Pay attention, will you?”

“Attention!” Hattie bellowed.

It took a minute, but he finally got her situated and they headed for the door. “I know you love to bang my bad knee, but I’m not going to let you do it today, all right?”

“Right!”

“Here comes the step.”

“Up?”

“Down, dumbbell, same as yesterday. You think somebody built a new step going the other way just to confuse you?”

“Down,” Hattie said, and together they took the step.

“There,” Sully said. “We made it again.”

“Made it!”

“Now,” he said. “When you go back tonight, which way will the step be?”

“Down!”

“Down?” Sully said. “You just went down. They can’t all be down. Sooner or later you got to go up, don’t you?”

“Up!”

“Here you are, old girl,” Sully said when they’d traveled the length of the diner under Cass’s watchful eye. “You want anything?”

The old woman slid in, smoothed her hands over the cool formica tabletop as if there might be a message for her there in Braille. “Who are you?” she said finally. “You sound like that darn Sully.”

“She’s losing ground,” Sully said when he joined Cass behind the counter and tied on an apron.

Cass looked at him over the tops of her glasses. “Don’t try to cheer me up,” she said.

Sully had been working at Hattie’s for over two weeks now, since Roof quit and went back home to North Carolina, leaving the village of Bath temporarily without a black man and thus a convenient external referent for the word “nigger.” It was not a much-used word anyway, and the residents of Bath, at least those who frequented Hattie’s, discovered that its rare use was now tied to muscle memory. For years whenever they’d used the word they’d looked around to locate Roof and make sure he hadn’t overheard them or to apologize if he had. Now that he was gone they still looked around and felt a little foolish when they remembered he was gone. For a day or two the regulars at Hattie’s had joked that a delegation would have to be sent over to Schuyler Springs, which had plenty of blacks, as evidenced by their football and basketball teams, and borrow a nigger until a permanent replacement for Roof could be found. When Sully decided to help Cass in the mornings, he’d had to take a lot of ribbing from those (it was Carl Roebuck’s line) who said they were relieved to discover how easy it was to find another nigger when you lost one.