Lottie's Wheel

An old man builds a ferris wheel in his yard

 
 Lottie's Wheel (1988)
 

 I'd known him a long time, Nelson. I'd no right to be surprised--he'd wanted it for years. But to see it for the first time with your own eyes--turning over the goldenrod and Queen Anne's Lace, making circles under the stars! And to think I had it in mind to talk him out of it last spring when it lay spread like a junk yard over his lot. Not that I could of done it. It was his mind, that's all. I knew better than to try.
 Known him since the war--before the war--since I was a kid. Not even Lottie could change his mind once he'd set a course. Dear God you should have heard her when he walked in the door and announced that he'd enlisted!
 "It's not enough they took your brother? You have a child and another on the way and your mother to care for, and all under one roof, the roof of your father's house! And you enlist? And you go and leave me here alone with two babies to feed and raise? It wasn't that she was yelling, or even raising her voice--but her face was white and flushed at the same time and tears hung to her eyes refusing to fall. Nelson just stood there in the door, kind of turning his enlistment papers over and over in his hand, no other sound but that and the bees in the hollyhocks outside.
          "Too late now," he said. "I'm all signed up."
 Lottie knew that nothing she could say would change him, signed up or not. He was a man who took counsel with himself, made his own mind, and never veered right or left after the fact. A small man, with small wants, fiercely felt.
 Nelson came back not too much the worse for it. He'd left his only brother behind, and he mourned that loss, but after a time he put it aside, set himself about the job of making a living, and got on with his life. Some of those kids who came back from Vietnam, like you see on TV even to this day--they seem to have forgotten how you do that, go on with your life. Not that I know any from around here like that. Jack Perry's eldest, Tom, come back one arm less, but no less a man; he just goes on about his life as best he can, like Nelson did.
 But that war touched us too, made its own kind of mark. Now and then he'd say something and you could feel it, hear it in his voice, like someone who's just caught something enormous moving out of the corner of his eye, and he goes on talking anyway, not even looking up, cause he knows by the time he does, it'll already be too late, and there'll be nothing there to point to.
 Nelson would think on these things, I don't know to what end, they being past understanding as far as I can see, but he was not one to let go a troubling thought till he got a hold on it that appeased him. Now and then you'd look, and know he'd be working on something, trying to find the words.
 We're sitting up on the roof some hot afternoon, say, after putting up new shingles, looking across the road where they're unloading the carnival, so hot and dirty we don't feel like moving enough even to pack up and get ourselves down on the ground and out of the sun. The cars are going by on the highway where the interstate is now. East and west they go by, some this way, some that, and the tires hiss on the hot pavement, and we hear first the locusts, then a truck roaring along, and then the locusts again, and then the traffic, and it's never quiet, and something is always moving, passing, passing us by.
 "That's what it's like," he says.
 "Like what," I ask?
 "Like that," he says, nodding toward the highway. "It never stops to wonder me, how it's all just there."
 "What's just there?" I ask him.
 "Everything. It's just there, some of it still, some of it moving, some of it growing, some of it passing away."
 "Well, sure it's there," I say, not quite catching his meaning, "What about it?"
 "That's not what I said," he answers. "I didn't say that. I didn't say 'It's there', I said just there."
 Now you tell me the difference between "there", and "just there". This is how he talks when it's a matter he's put some thought to, so I waited for him to explain, which I knew he'd do if I kept quiet.
 "What I mean is, once you've figured that out, that's it. you can't get further into it."
 "Further into what," I'm thinking, getting good and confused, but still keeping to myself.
 "Ask me what it means," he says now, sweeping his hand from west to east. "Just ask me."
 "All right, what's it mean?"
 "It's just there. That's what it means." He sat hard on the word 'that's'. "If it moves, it moves at its own pace, and if it sits, it sits without a thought of moving. And what we feel or think about it doesn't mean a thing. It's just there."
 And that's what he got from the war.
 I still have letters he wrote--not to me, I was just a kid--to my sister, Lottie. You know, he didn't say much about the war while they were fighting it. It was afterwards, in those weeks before he come home. He opened up in those letters in a rush of words that'd make you think this couldn't be by Nelson's hand. How the roads were clogged with refugees, German civilians: old women with bundles of cloths wrapped in blankets, young women with children, children with nobody at all--and all of them desperate to get to the American sector before Russians caught up with them. It was what came to the ones who didn't make it that got to him. You learned to pay no mind to what you can't change. Keep to the middle of the road; don't look to the right, don't look to the left. The war was like a storm passed over that fixes in your mind, and then you look up and the sky is clear--but ever after you keep one eye on the horizon.
 "Did I ever tell you about me and Lottie going up to Cedar Point together before we got married?"
 "No," I told him.
 "Did Lottie?"
 She hadn't, and I told him, no, again. Nelson was grinning like a baby now.
 I could see he was thinking about how much of this he wanted to tell, and how much to leave out, looking down over the edge of the roof like he was checking out what was there, and grinning away.
 Everybody knew about the weekend Lottie and Nelson just disappeared, but no one knew where they'd been; though we had a pretty good guess as to what they were about. I had to look off the other way so he wouldn't see the smile I had on.
 "We went to Sandusky Park while we were there. Rode the Cedar Point ferris wheel, the biggest one in the world now, you know. Must be a hundred-fifty feet high. If you time it right when you get on, and we did, you ride for a long, long time while people are getting on and off. The best part is stopping up at the top. We were lucky to be the only ones in our car--a world to ourselves; the stars close enough to tangle in your hair."
 They were fastening the seats onto that little carnie wheel now, bolting one down, then raising it up to make way for the next. The sky had got real dark behind us, and out of the speakers across the road, recorded calliope music from the merry-go-round was making harmony with the locusts. Suddenly there was a breeze where there'd been none before and the branches lifted up in the wind and the leaves were waving pale side over. In that bruise-purple dark pushing up behind us there was a crack of lightning. We held our breath for the thunder, and it sure didn't keep us waiting.
 "I guess we'd better get down off the roof," he said, and we did for a fact.
 * * *
 Lottie took care of me as a kid. A good big sister. Almost ten years between us, so we didn't have the kind of fights kids often do. Not having a sister, she talked to me the way she would of talked to a sister if she had one. She read to me, talked to me about things she'd have on her mind. A lot I didn't understand, but it didn't matter none.
 From as far back as I can remember she wanted to be a doctor, then when she was a little older, she lowered her sights a bit and talked about going to nursing school, then she married Nelson right after high school, who had a strange and wonderful mind that I think she believed might transport them both someplace exotic and far off, but it didn't. Though it might have, if things had worked out different.
 There was a time she thought she'd go to medical school. She wanted to be an obstetrician. Babies just fascinated her. She baby-sat for everyone in town. "Never let go of the thing you most need," she'd tell me, "because if you do, it will come back on you and that'll be the very thing that breaks you."
 She had two girls by Nelson, Dottie and Bess. When Dottie, the oldest, was seven, Lottie had a boy, but it never lived to see light of day. The night she came home from the hospital, Nelson woke up, reached over to where she should of been, and felt she was gone. The light was on in the bathroom, so he didn't think much about first off, but there wasn't a sound, nothing, no water running, no movement, just quiet. He found her passed out in a pool of blood. She was gone before they got her to the hospital.
 Nelson kept saying, "I've got two to raise alone now, thank God they're girls." He said that cause his thinking was, a girl will pay it back to a father, the way most boys won't. He had two he could count on when he got old, and what was scaring him most after losing Lottie, though he wouldn't say it, was the thought of getting old by himself. I think he'd made up his mind right from the start. He knew he'd never marry again.
 The girls loved it when the carnival came. Nelson would take them, and I'd usually come along. The Carl J. Sedlmayer Show, I think was the one that came by then, a pretty good show too. A lot bigger than that little bunch of rides and concessions they set up now behind St. Jude's. We were standing there watching the girls shoot at rows of steel ducks, when he says, right out of the blue; "I want one of those." 
 "One of what?" I ask, real puzzled, looking over the kewpie dolls and plaster clowns.
 "A Ferris wheel," he said, nodding toward the spokes of light rising and falling behind the concession stands. I think I'll do it. I think someday I'm going to have my own. Set it up in the front yard."
 It's the sort of thing he'd say, and I didn't take him so serious at the time; he'd tell the girls stuff like this too. He rode the Ferris wheel with Dottie on one side and Bess on the other, and tell them how someday he was going to build one for them in his own yard. They loved that when they were still little, it made them excited and happy to think about such a thing as their very own, but of course they didn't really believe him either. "That way," he'd tell them, "you'll have reason to stay around when I get old, bring me my grandchildren to keep me company."
 They would have done that too, cause he did a good job of raising them. He sold most of the farm--it had been his father's--just after Lottie died. The town was growing out around it, and he got a decent price for the land. He made a good guess after the war when he saw how houses were being built outside Toledo and Cleveland--all of them with yards with nothing growing on 'em but dirt--that these people were going to be wanting shrubs and fruit trees and flowers, and there'd be nurseries springing up nearby, and the nurseries would have to get plants from someplace, cause they were more interested in selling than growing. That was bingo, on the mark, I'm telling you! He soon had a business where he was supplying places all over northern Ohio and Michigan, making good money the likes of which he'd of never seen from that farm, yet it let him be right at home where he could take care of his girls, and he planned it all to work out just like that too.
 You didn't see it the way he put himself into his work, how much he missed Lottie, and he went right on missing her too. He wouldn't hear it when folks would tell him he was too young to stay a widower, and should think about finding a wife and mother for the girls; "for the girls' sake," they'd tell him, "if not for yours," and that made him mad, cause he thought he was doing just fine with the girls, and the girls felt the same way.  
 There was a while he was on good terms with a woman up around Fremont. It livened him up and put a shine in his eyes; made me glad to see him that way, too, but she was set on having children. Nelson told me later it was the hardest choice he ever faced. To his own surprise, he found he liked the idea--being a father again, of starting over like a young man. But when he looked his girls in the eye and tried to think what he'd tell them, he couldn't bear the thought. It was like being unfaithful to Lottie, he said--though he knew in his heart she wouldn't of held it against him. Nelson put her off and put her off, till this woman said she was running out of time--went to Chicago to live with a sister. "You have to take your chances," she told him in a letter. And that was the last he heard of her.

 * * *
 It wasn't just Nelson that missed Lottie. I didn't know how much I did, how much I missed her, too, how often she would come to mind unasked for.
 Something would happen, something that would make me laugh-- and you know I still do this--I sort of look around for her to tell her about this thing, to hear her laugh back, and she won't be there, but a kind of space, an empty place with her shape will meet me, and I'll be shut up dumb for just that second, before the space fills in again with whatever things might be going on around me at the time. Makes me think that's how people came to believe in ghosts.
 It was at Bess's wedding that it really came home to me. It would have been such a fine wedding. All the women at the church pitched in to help Nelson with the reception, but that's a story in itself. Nelson being Nelson, he wanted to pay for everything, pay these women for what they saw as their free will gift to him and his child. The pastor finally worked out an arrangement where Nelson could give to a list of favorite charities these women drew up. Of course, it cost him plenty anyway, which made him happy. There were the flowers (not a one of which came from his own nursery either-- he insisted on having them brought in from a florist in Detroit), and the dresses for the bride and all the bride's maids, and two bands, one for the older folks and a rock band for the kids, and he had a limo rented to take them all the way to New York, cause that's where they wanted to have their honeymoon.
 You should have seen the reception. It was set up outside the church on the lawn between the parsonage and Larry Carter's orchard, under the last big elms to survive in this part of the state. There were streamers and lanterns hanging from the trees, long tables with tablecloths, red roses on white, with vases up and down the table filled with baby's breath and blue bachelor's buttons, and there was a white painted trellis with roses woven into the lattices for the bride and groom to stand under for pictures. It was a sight, and so many people there: business acquaintances, his customers from as far as Chicago, not to mention almost the whole town, of course, and members of Nelson's family up from around Zanesville.
 After the ceremony, coming out of the church with people throwing rice, and snapping pictures, that's when I started thinking about Lottie, and wanted her to be there so bad it was burning a hole in me. I could hardly keep up the work of smiling and looking fine for Bess and Nelson, the sun was right in my eyes, just glinting like knives through the elm tree, flashing on and off as the wind moved the leaves, and there was Bess without Lottie's locket--the one I gave her when she married Nelson.  
 "Where's your mother's locket," I asked her, when I should have let it pass. "Don't you want it for the pictures?" Oh, she was mortified. She'd forgotten it, and that was her 'something old'.  
 When I saw how upset she was, I felt terrible, and told her it was all right; her mother would have understood, with all the excitement, and nothing should spoil a day like this.
 "But it's not too late for the pictures," she said. "Someone can run back to the house and pick it up." Now Dottie was there by her side, and she was upset too, cause she'd been acting the big sister and helping her get ready and remembering all the details so it was like it was her fault. She was insisting that she be the one to go back for the locket, but her car was surrounded by other cars and there's was no way she could get it out of there.
 "Well," I said, more joking than serious, "you could hop on Peter's motorcycle. That would sure get you in and out of this crowd." Well, that hit them both as just the thing to do, since they'd spent time with Peter, and knew how to ride the thing, being good athletes and smart girls and not much for old ideas about what's ladylike and what's not. In fact, they thought they should go together, one last sisterly fling. With their long dresses pulled up and blowing behind them, the idea really knocked them over, as they put it; they loved it, and it was a sight for a fact, Bess in white and Dottie in pink like a summer cloud wrapped in a trail of dust they roared off down the driveway and vanished around the curve at the bottom of the hill on the way to the interstate.
 It's a sight I keep in my mind's eye to this day, and to this day I think about what it was that made me take notice of that missing locket, and why I made mention of it. It's the kind of thing Nelson will talk about. Even when you're the one making the moves, he'll say, might as well be another hand at work, turning the wheel what way it wills. As though you were just watching, passing by on the road, like you have no part in it.
 But you are a part of it, and that's what leaves a mark of hurt, and though it wears thin with time, never comes clean again, not ever.
 We stood around for a long while waiting. With everything so festive, nobody thought to get anxious. The photographers were set up in front of the trellis. The food was all out on the tables, and the table in the center was covered with gifts, and boxes with ribbons and flowers were piled up under it, with the cake in the middle of the table about three feet high waiting for the bride and groom to come and cut it. The guests stood around, waiting and talking, waiting to raise a drink and toast the bride, ready for a good time. Then it got to be a long while, and a longer while. People were looking at each other and talking softly, almost whispering by now so when the phone rang in the church office everybody heard it, and we all watched John Shankley come out stone faced and say something in the pastor's ear, and all you could hear then were the blackbirds cackling away in the elms and the buzz of the locusts, and the trucks rumbling by way down the road on the highway going back and forth, back and forth, everyone still as cut grass. And there was Nelson off to one side, only the muscles working in his jaw to give him away, just there, just there.
 

 * * *
 It had been years since I'd thought about that day at the carnival. Nelson called me about three in the afternoon. It was January, and by the time I rode into his driveway the sun was already real low, and it was awful cold.
 We hadn't had a flake of snow yet, but it had been bitter for weeks. He didn't say where we were going, but he wanted to use his pickup, so I sat there looking out the window as we drove, squinting, the sun laying silver on the corn stubble with a brightness that cut your eyes like light off a field of broken mirrors. We ended up at Bob Shaffer's.
 Bob had a yard full of old cars, most of them Studebakers. He collected them: bodies, motors, fenders; rusted transmissions that lay around clotted with grass. There were stacks of hubcaps, hundreds of them. He said the Studebakers were a collector's dream, real valuable, and all he needed was to do a little work on them and he could make a handsome profit. He'd been saying that for years. Trees grew out the windows. I guess he was waiting for the price to be right.
 In the winter, he used to let a carnie outfit that did business in the area in warm weather--setting up for churches, fairs, volunteer fire company benefits, you know the kind of thing--let them leave some of the rides in his yard for the winter. They went down to Florida in the fall, but some of the bigger rides they'd leave behind. I'm sure you've guessed by now what was sitting off the side of the house, broken down in an awful jumble, but the axle and spokes were all together, and the support towers laying on their sides. There was no mistake about it.
 "Oh my God, Nelson, you're not?"
 "Well, just thought I'd look, just check out what he's got here, that's all."
 "That's all, my foot." I said. I knew better than to believe that. But like I said, I also know better than to argue with him, so I didn't say more. This carnie outfit must of gone out of business some years ago. They'd left the thing and Bob didn't know how to get a hold of them, which made him mad enough, since he wasn't getting paid for storage. Now he was trying to sell it. I wasn't the only one who knew about Nelson and his Ferris wheel.
 It looked to be a thing that couldn't be done, make this wheel new again, but if it could, Nelson would be the man to do it I told myself, and yet even as I thought the words, I felt a cold about my throat. It was no ordinary job he was taking on here. You could see it in the way he moved around that yard, his jaw set, his eyes agleam. Steel tubing, buggy seats scattered this way and that--he made his way through the rubble with a concentration that was almost scary. The way he'd stop, slowly run the tips of his fingers over some poor broken part--you could of thought we were visitors at an ancient holy site drawing power from the bones of the sacred dead, instead of old Shaffer's junk yard like we were, walking amongst the bodies of wrecked Studebakers. Bob saw it too. Even he got quiet. The two of us stood there watching Nelson. Dark had begun to settle and the sky cast its last blood shot rays like stage lights over the yard. Not a sound to be heard but far off a dog barking, and near by, Nelson's slow and careful steps among the heaps of rods and bands, the sound his heel made sinking into the soft, wet earth, and when that red and black wool jacket caught on a bar and pulled loose, snapping it against the tower beam, the sound shot back across the field, reverberating like ripples on a pond. I could of sworn to see that ring of sound, wheeling up around Nelson, he growing smaller as the circle grew larger, disappearing into his own silhouette, the shadow he cast against the walls of the coming night, his hand, lifted up to adjust his cap, caught in mid air, atremble.
 That very night, after paying Bob forty five dollars and fifty cents, in the dark, cold as it was, the two of us loaded one of the buggy seats on the back of the truck, along with a huge spanner wrench, three buckets of bolts and the gasoline motor and gear box that used to run the thing. He told Bob he'd pick up the rest as best he could over the winter, which got Bob in a heat, and Nelson ended up having to pay another fifteen bucks for storage.
 "Not bad," he told me on the way back. "Eli Bridge Company. Might of cost forty thousand new. Bet it ran on steam when it was. Probably older than either one of us now. And if you and me were put on the market block, we'd be damn lucky to bring sixty bucks for the both of us!"
 When we finished unloading the stuff and had it stored away in his work shed it was snowing. It snowed for most of the next four days, off and on, more than 20 inches with some pretty good drifts too. It just stayed cold that winter, and one snow didn't melt before the next one came down over it. I'm not that young now myself, and don't care much to walk when it's slick, and like driving less, so I didn't see Nelson till Spring. When I did, it was a sight there I won't soon forget.
 That motor sat in his shed and just shown. He'd polished it and ground down the piston heads. The same for the gear box, which had a big handle with a bright red, new-painted oak handgrip he'd turned himself, and there was one seat had red vinyl upholstery, and gleamed black and chrome, and he'd soaked in rust remover and scoured and oiled about half the bolts, which lay in neat rows up on the shelves opposite the door. Stacks of steel rods and spanners and tubing lay on the floor, some of them cleaned of rust and painted and shinny black, and some just rubbed with steel wool, and some still not touched from what they were when he dumped them down from the truck. There were light fixtures and coils of wire stacked in boxes under the window. What couldn't fit in the shed, was stacked under tarps in the yard. What he didn't have tarps for just lay there, clotted with mud and weeds.
 He'd bought a brand new generator which he said he could run with the old motor, and would light it up like the best carnival-model wheel.  
 Over the winter, his voice had taken on the quaver of an old man. He looked tired. I watched him pick up a three foot spanner, slow to rise from the waist, lean it against a bench and start rubbing with steel wool. He worked at it hard at first, then slowed, and slowed some more. You could see him pour himself out, pour his heart's blood into every stroke. I couldn't help but wonder where he found the strength to keep at it. As though he were drawing from a well so deep within himself its source went back to the waters that bore him.
 "Be done by August," he said. His voice still full of conviction, but so quiet, soft. Weariness and strength woven together till they couldn't be told apart.
 "Sure." I said.
 When I went into his house to use his bathroom, I hardly recognized the place. He'd always kept it up clean and neat as if he'd had a wife or maid, or both. But as I passed through the kitchen I saw dishes stacked in the sink, pots on the stove caulked with food days old, cabinet doors hanging open to mostly empty shelves--it looked that canned goods and whatever wouldn't perish got left in the bags they came home in, setting here and there around the floor and on the chairs and kitchen table.
 I didn't walk back to the shed before I left, but called out from the back door to let him know. He didn't even look up as I pulled the car door shut. 
* * *
 This morning, August 14th, twenty-five years to the day since we lost Bess and Dottie. It's Sunday, and Nelson and I went to church, something neither of us do much, then we drove out to the cemetery. There's Lottie's stone, and the girls', my sister as fresh in my mind as when I was twelve years old, so I wasn't saying much, and Nelson was quiet from his own thoughts. A yellow swallowtail was flying around Bess's stone; Nelson reached down and pulled some crabgrass and purslane out from around Lottie's stone, and still bent over, he asked me if I could drop by his place this evening, and I said sure. I had to hold his elbow to raise him up straight again.
 * * *
 He had it up, all right, God knows how he raised those towers. It didn't seem he'd gotten much further with the cleaning and shining than he had in the spring. Two of the carriages were upholstered and painted, a few with the old seats in place as he'd found them, the rest hanging there in every state between, some no more than empty frames, still clung with dry morning glories from Bob Shaffer's yard. It looked as if a fresh breeze would of clattered it down like a pile of stick toys. I shifted foot to foot and waited, half hoping he'd ask me up to ride, half scared he would.  
 "Don't worry," he said, reading my thoughts. "It's sound. I didn't skimp on what holds her up." I followed him over to the base of the wheel.  
 "I had in mind to make her like new again, like the day of her first carnival. Like she'd just come out of the factory--but then I'd get to looking at her, lying about my yard in her late disarray, and I came to see a kind of dignity in her fallen state.  
 "We're both of us too old for that," I told her, as if she could hear. "And come too far to hide it. It would be ungraceful of us if we tried."  
 Nelson leaned over and pulled a switch on a breaker box at the foot of one of the towers, and when he did, everything just came to glory. There he stood, frail as a ghost, lit up by that wheel as though the light were passing through him.
 "Well, what do you think?" he asked.
 We stood together looking for a time before climbing in, the wheel rising up above us twice the height of the trees. "It's quite a sight, Nelson." I told him, and it was for a fact.
 There was only a little haze from the heat in the air, and the sky was darker than I remember it since I was a kid. Wheeling around in those gentle circles, our feet nearly brushed the tall grass, then we'd rise back up into the dark--the sky spattered like a painter's tarp with stars, and the crickets making the air vibrate around us. I couldn't help but think back on that ferris wheel in Cedar heights--on what it must of been like when they pulled the safety bar closed and rose up alone together into the dark, the carnival spread out below. It made me feel a sadness almost more than I could hold...but when I looked over at Nelson, he had such a look of peace about him, I felt ashamed. "Paul," he says, "I'm glad you came. I wanted you to be the first to behold her," he told me, as we rose up toward the moon. "There's not everyone who understands these things."  
 From Nelson, I knew that for high praise, and hearing praise from Nelson couldn't have meant more to me if it were my own father, come back from the dead. I sat, flushed and proud, like a kid.
 Since we were up, out and beyond the sight of the world anyway, and past caring what anyone might think, I took his hand in mine. He just pressed against my palm a bit, like it was the most natural thing in the world.  
 He'd rigged the wheel so he could control it from our seat, and when we came to the top of the circle, he made it stop. Heat lightning lit the rim of the horizon. 
 Now there's a point you get to when words don't mean anything. I guess we were at that point, up there in the middle of the night sky, cause we sat for a long time, listening to the crickets, invisible, held up there like by a hand in the dark, on top of Lottie's wheel--a wheel of brightness raised against the night for all to see.