Excerpt
Excerpt from the novella
The Sugarhouse
(To be published by Open Books in 2010)
by Donald O'Donovan
© 2010 Moronic Ox Literary Journal - Escape Media Publishers / Open Books
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Twenty years had passed since I'd left Cooperstown. Now I was going back. Why, I didn’t know. I no longer knew anyone in Cooperstown. I'd just returned to New York from Europe. My wife and I had separated. Christmas was approaching. I got an unexpected check from my publisher. Middle age does strange things to a man. I found myself thinking, as I strolled along MacDougal Street, about my hometown. Was Elm Street still there? And Brooklyn Avenue? Did the Sawmill whistle still blow at five o'clock? What had happened to that all-too-comfortable little world in which I once swam like a goldfish in a bowl? Was it still intact, a relic from an innocent age, or had it been swept away, as so much of the world has been swept away, and did the past, my past, as I strongly suspected, now exist only in my mind? Suddenly, I had to find out.
The next day, December 24th—Christmas Eve—I boarded a bus, carrying a single suitcase. As we cleared the frozen city maze and inched our way into the Hudson Valley world of softly rounded hills dotted with farmhouses I fell asleep. The instant I closed my eyes I was surrounded. I heard the rustle of clothing, a murmuring of voices. I saw their faces, faces of people I hadn't seen, much less thought of, in twenty years. They were all around me, rushing forward to greet me. The driver hissed on the brakes and I awoke. A cow was blocking the road. As we crept forward I saw the brute's huge head next to the windowpane, the enormous glistening eye, the steaming breath standing in the air, the slaver from the jaws frozen into icicles. I thought of Rip Van Winkle, who slept for twenty years. Maybe the same thing had happened to me. Could it be that the twenty years that had passed since I’d left Cooperstown were only a dream? Could it be that I was now awakening, awakening to my real life, which had somehow continued, despite my absence, in that slumbering steepled village? As I dozed again in my seat I heard someone say that the bus was running three, maybe four hours late. I opened my eyes and saw sleet striking the windowpane. The driver was crawling in second gear. Some Canadians behind me were speaking French. I understood part of it. The woman was asking her son if he had to go pipi. A speaker crackled and blurted out the name of a town, some God-forsaken hole. The bus lurched to a stop and I opened my eyes. People were getting on and off. I pressed my face against the cold window. Already it was getting dark. Ice-coated cables sagged from fragile black telephone poles. A few shabby gray buildings shuddered on the frozen streets. A block away a Genesee beer sign blinked blue and red. I was feeling apprehensive now, panicky even. Like Rip Van Winkle, I was returning to the world of Time, but perhaps too late. Twenty years. What if the scenery had been dismantled? Supposing the whole town had been bulldozed away to make room for a strip mall, what one thing would I want to remain, to remain forever? Immediately I thought of the Sugarhouse. Yes, the Sugarhouse. Smash everything if you must, but don't destroy the Sugarhouse. That was my prayer.
The Sugarhouse, as everyone called it—and the nickname had a double meaning—was over on Brooklyn Avenue near the lumberyard, a sprawling Victorian house, the home of Ma Rutledge and her two daughters, Bertha and Emma. Hollyhocks bloomed along the drive, and an enormous lilac bush threatened to engulf the porch. Around back Ma Rutledge had a sunken vegetable garden bursting with corn and tomatoes, string beans and raspberries. A apple tree near the garden bore red juicy apples, Northern Spies, and in late fall the neighborhood kids came to gather up the apples that covered the ground like a bumpy red blanket. When spring arrived, March to be exact, Ma and the girls drove spouts into the big maple tree in the front yard and into the many trees in the maple orchard behind the house and drained out buckets of sap for maple syrup. Despite all of this bucolic atmosphere, Ma's place, the big house on Brooklyn Avenue, the Sugarhouse, as it was called—was a whorehouse. Customers entered and sat down in the parlor, which was dimly lit and musty smelling, but well furnished with a number of overstuffed chairs and an antique divan as big as a landing barge. On the mantle above the brick fireplace with its gleaming brass andirons were photographs of the two older sisters, Estelle and Danielle, who had done their time in the nunnery and graduated. Estelle was married to a truck driver in Utica and Danielle supposedly had gone to the Big Apple and become a model, a story which I doubted, not only because of the family longshoreman physique that all the Rutledge girls had inherited, but because nobody from Cooperstown ever became a model or anything. Also on the mantle was a photograph of Hap, the only Rutledge son, killed at the Chosin Reservoir, and a large, gilt-framed photo of Mr. Rutledge, snapped at a picnic at Three Mile Point. Mr. Rutledge had been dead for twenty years, but in the photo he was bright and chipper, wearing a floppy hat, holding a nice string of perch in one hand and a foaming glass of beer in the other. He stood in the sunshine with his mustache drooping, squinting a little and smiling contentedly.Ma Rutledge presided over the Sugarhouse, a sturdily built woman with the flattened bulldog face. She wore thick rimless glasses that hugely magnified her eyes, and a growth of silky black hair graced her upper lip. When the door chimes tolled lugubriously, Ma showed the fellows into the parlor and asked who they were calling for that particular evening. Since the only two girls were Bertha and Emma, there really wasn't much of a choice. Customers could bring in their own whiskey, rum or vodka, and a beer bar in the adjoining room featured an old Wurlitzer jukebox, a shuffleboard and a flashing Genesee beer sign. The goingson at the Sugarhouse were conducted in a sedate and mannerly fashion. If the sunburned farmers waiting in the dim parlor wanted a soft drink or some ice, Ma served them, or they were free to go into the kitchen and get their own and leave their money in the cigar box on the cooler.A dark carpeted hallway led from the parlor to the bedrooms, and every so often Emma or Bertha would come padding out in a transparent shift and peer curiously at everyone. That always fetched a chorus of cheers, especially from the shuffleboard players in the bar. The Rutledge sisters were big hulking girls with tremendous breasts and chocolate brown areolas the size of silver dollars. Emma was cheerful, outgoing and none too bright. Bertha, a couple years older, was somewhat more thoughtful and reserved. She wore horn-rimmed glasses and had a black mustache like her mother.You were liable to see anybody in Ma Rutledge's parlor, including the local politicians and the mayor. Teddy Granger, the singing taxi driver, was a regular, and Rory Goodnight, the drunken housepainter, would usually be hoisting a few at the bar or playing shuffleboard with some of the County men like Paul Greenfield or the Fighting Fairchild Brothers from the West Exeter. The handsome and charismatic artist, Garth DeGrace, was also a frequent visitor.There was never anything secret or underhanded about the operation. The whole town knew about the Sugarhouse. Bill Rassmussen, the town cop, came around periodically, just to check on things, but no one was in the least alarmed by his presence. Bill never made any trouble, and, as he himself was fond of saying—although of course it wasn't true—“I'm too old to fuck.” Most nights he’d watch the shuffleboard game and guzzle a beer at the bar, or chat with the boys in the parlor while he warmed his hands and feet at the glowing Franklin stove.Although the townies, myself included, naturally harbored a certain amount of resentment against Bill Rassmussen because he was a cop, he was generally considered to be a pretty good joe. Bill had never been known to arrest anybody. If you wanted to make an illegal U-turn in the middle of Main Street, it was all right with Bill, because God knows there was plenty of room to do it. And if you had yourself a whiskey still, like Honey Joe Finocchio out on Beaver Meadow Road, well, that was okay too, because it's a good thing in the evening after a day's plowing to sit on the porch with a glass of homemade whiskey and watch the dog bring the cows home.Bill Rassmussen was beautifully corrupt and human. He wasn't looking to bust somebody, and he wasn't out to revenge himself on life for making him the mediocrity that he was. He took his duties seriously, yet he never did anything dramatic or final. He'd pull teenagers over for drunk driving, give them a hell of a lecture, then follow them home with the light flashing and insist that their fathers put them on curfew and double chores for two weeks, but he never issued a citation. He never busted a whiskey still, and he never set out to eradicate the “evil” of prostitution. He had no illusions about reforming the world. He did his duty, not according to the letter of the law, but by his own seat-of-the-pants feeling of what was best for folks. The happiest times at the Sugarhouse came when Ma Rutledge was making maple syrup. In the kitchen, the candy kitchen, with the windows steamed, Ma wielded the skimmer, scooping the sudsy yellow foam off the top of the sap kettle. When the sap had boiled down the girls would fetch plates of snow and Ma dipped the skimming ladle into the kettle and poured fresh maple syrup onto the snow. The hot syrup froze into chewy pretzels of maple candy, “snow candies,” which the girls then carried to the men in the parlor.Frequently right after this Ma would bake apples and bring them out on a tray, sprinkled with brown sugar and cinnamon. The smoking crust of the apples, pierced by the tines of a fork, pissed jets of fizzing juice that hardened into cinnamon-sugar candy. During these sap-boiling days the sugary breath of the candy kitchen penetrated everywhere. The beds of the girls were saturated with sweetness. A roll in the hay with Emma or Bertha was like rolling in pastry flour.“Fucking Bertha is like plunking a water-soaked log.” That’s the way Teddy Granger, the singing taxi driver, put it one night when we were tipping a few beers at the Glimmerglass Bar and Grill on Main Street, “the Glim,” as everyone called it. I had to agree with Teddy. You got on top of Bertha and slugged away for all you were worth, but you might as well have been sawing wood or pumping bilge water for all she cared. Bertha was forever reading detective novels in bed and didn't like to be interrupted for any reason, if you get what I mean. She’d lie there immovable, a mountain of female flesh, delicately clearing her throat and crisply turning the pages of her book. Her heart just wasn't in it.Emma was different. She was around nineteen or twenty, a lazy, slatternly girl who liked nothing better than to spend the day sitting in her sunken vegetable garden in the sunshine, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and wiggling her toes in the dirt. That was heaven to her. Emma never talked about the past or the future. She was alive and that was enough.It wasn't like climbing over any waterlogged piece of wood, either, when you went to the room with Emma. It was more like humping a wildcat—or a nurse shark. Emma was shaped like a cello. You could coax a pretty tune out of Emma provided you had plenty of resin on your bow. You didn’t have to be a virtuoso, either. If you could change chords reasonably well and pluck her strings con amore, she'd pour out a flood of exquisite night music, the sort of music that's ecstasy to a man.
Now available from
Open Books
Written on twenty-three legal pads while homeless on the streets of LA, Night Train
paints a graphic picture of the
lives of street people in America.
Get on board as author
Donald O'Donovan takes us on an introspective journey into our personal and cultural conscience.
(mobi)
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About the Author:
Donald O’Donovan is an optioned screenwriter and voice actor with film and audio book credits. He was born in Cooperstown, New York. A teenage runaway, O’Donovan rode freights, traveled the US, joined the army to get off the street, lived in Mexico, and worked at more than 200 occupations including long distance truck driver, undertaker and roller skate repairman. Donald O’Donovan recently narrated the documentary film, The Forgotten, produced and directed by Sarem Yadegari. His screenplay, Cutter’s Woods, was a semi-finalist in the 2009 FilmStream Screenplay Competition.
Donald O'Donovan
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