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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
January 29, 2006
Published as Fiction
in 1993.
© 1993 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Maples (Contact), 1968
© 1968 by Bud Grossmann
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WARMING A WOMAN IN WINTER
At ten past six on a Sunday morning in mid-February in 1993, as Al Scheerer reaches for the telephone beside his bed, the first thought that sparks through his mind is someone is calling to wish him a Happy Valentine’s Day. Almost two years have gone by since Al’s wife, Lorraine (née Petersen), passed away. Al would not be a bit surprised today to receive an early morning call from either of two ladies who have given him comfort and support in recent months.
“Good morning?” he cautiously says into the phone.
“Is this the Furnace Man?” It is not a flirtatious suggestion but a business inquiry. Alton Scheerer, a plumbing contractor by profession, does indeed advertise his one-person firm by that name in The Ninian Shopper, the local weekly paper.
“Yes, ma’am. How might I help you?”
The caller, a Mrs. Ulrich living six miles out of town on County Trunk C, tells Al she woke on this frosty Sabbath to a house so cold she could see her breath.
Al asks a few questions: make of furnace, location of oil tank, did she fill the tank last fall? Al knows where the Ulrich farm is, but he can’t recall that he ever worked for Mrs. Ulrich. She makes no apology for the early hour of her call, and she mentions that she first called Al’s two competitors but reached only “those blasted phone machines.” Actually, she says “doze blastet vone machines”; her accent is from the old country, like that of Al’s Bavarian grandparents on his father’s side. Al’s mother’s people came from Scotland.
Over the past several decades, the population of Ninian, Wisconsin, has held so steady—right around 9,000—that the town has never gone to the expense, after each census, of updating the signs at the city limits. It is the biggest town in, and the county seat of, Galloway County. Some people maybe would think a friendly and busy guy like Al Scheerer would know just about everyone in the area, but with two other outfits doing furnace work and pipefitting in the county, there are a lot of folks Scheerer will never meet.
Al cannot picture this Mrs. Ulrich, although he can easily imagine her place with its bright flowerbeds in summer in front of a wide-porched house. He has noticed the well-kept barn, the bright-domed silos, and, for many years, the only Guernsey herd anywhere about. There were Holsteins on the place for a while, but Al doesn’t remember seeing any stock at all on the farm in recent times. Hans Ulrich was the old man, the dairyman, the Guernsey man. Gone now. Dead and gone. This woman must be his widow.
There is something familiar about Mrs. Ulrich’s voice, Al thinks, as he sets the telephone back into its cradle and swings his bare legs out from under his quilt.
This morning is cold. The Furnace Man keeps his own furnace thermostat turned low.
Yes, there is something familiar about that woman’s voice. Al knew Hans Ulrich by sight, but did Al ever meet the wife? He doesn’t think so. Going down the hallway to the bathroom, Al rubs the stubble on his chin with the back of his hand, then rubs his nose and inhales sharply. He is faintly aware of the scent of chalk dust.
St. John’s Lutheran has two Sunday worship times, but if Al can’t make the eight o’clock service, he does not go at all. So today he skips his morning shave but takes time to brew a small pot of coffee—which he decants into a thermos—and he spreads butter and jam on toast before heading out in his van to warm the woman with the mystery voice.
Driving east, Al sees the day’s first streaks of sunlight pierce the leafless branches in a stand of maples and turn the frost and filth on his windshield to blazing gold. With the dawning of the day comes the sudden realization of where Al has heard that voice before. In second grade it was! Frau Olhausen!
Oh, but it couldn’t be. Why, that was over forty years ago. If Frau Olhausen had stayed in the area, surely Al would have read of her in the papers, would have seen her at the grocery or a Firemen’s Picnic or a funeral. No, it couldn’t be.
Above the rumble of his van’s V-8, Al thought he could hear the clear clang of a beckoning bell—a genuine brass, rope-operated school bell. Memories of those first years at Ninian Grade School surged into Al’s awareness. The scent of chalk dust. The cloakroom aromas of mud and rubber when the children took off their coats and overshoes at this time of year so many years ago. The creak of hinged-bench desk seats and the coolness of varnished oak desktops. The chatter of children, and then the sudden silence when Frau Olhausen sternly stared at her students.
This is the first part
of a two-part story.
♦
Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
February 5, 2006
Published as Fiction
in 1993.
© 1993 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Maples, 1968
© 1968 by Bud Grossmann
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WARMING A WOMAN IN WINTER
(The Second Part of a Two-Part Story)
Mrs. Olhausen had been Al Scheerer’s teacher in second grade, but he’d scarcely thought of her ever since. “Frau” Olhausen, that is. In those years just after the Second World War, some German-Americans were anglicizing their names, but Helga Olhausen honored her heritage and her husband by keeping the “Frau” in front of hers. Childless and widowed—her husband had never returned from U.S. Infantry service in the Pacific—Frau Olhausen kept good order in her classroom but brought humor and warmth to every lesson.
Al recalls now how she dealt with unruly boys. For a first offense, whatever it might be, the child was ordered to stand in the back corner of the room. If, on the same day, Frau Olhausen had to admonish that fellow again, she placed him on a chair beside her desk at the front of the room. Occasionally, someone would act up yet a third time, and then the teacher held the boy in her lap as she sat behind her desk and continued the lesson at hand.
Al had earned this ultimate punishment—if punishment it was—only once, on a spring day in 1947. And yet, today, almost half a century later, he can still feel the scalding blush that crossed his face when his ears brushed the firm pillow of Frau Olhausen’s bosom. He can smell the starched, coarse cotton weave of her dress front; he can feel the weight of his legs upon his teacher’s sturdy thighs. His feet, in scuffed, leather-soled shoes, are dangling above the schoolroom floor.
Al remembers St. Valentine’s Day of 1947. At the end of each school day, the second-graders would line up at the classroom door for dismissal. In turn, each would look the teacher in the eye, solemnly shake her hand, and declare, “Goodbye, and thank you, Frau Olhausen.” With a sunny smile, Helga Olhausen would reply with equal formality. To Al: “Gootbye und thank you, Mr. Scheerer.” If a child were willing, Frau Olhausen would bend low and place a kiss on that student’s cheek.
At the close of that particular Valentine’s Day, Al now recalls, his teacher presented a nickel Hershey bar to every student in the class and bestowed a kiss on every upturned face.
Little Alton Scheerer ran directly home. Clutching his rattling red lunch pail in one hand and a red, lace-trimmed card and the chocolate bar in the other, he rushed in the front door and excitedly showed his mother the candy. He told her Frau Olhausen had given out the Hershey bars, and he said, “She kissed me, Mother! But I didn’t kiss her back!” That remark must have tickled Mrs. Scheerer—Al heard her repeat the line, that evening, to his father at the supper table.
Al Scheerer, the Furnace Man, turns in at the Ulrich driveway and parks by the fuel oil tank beside a bright white machine shed beyond the house. Frau Olhausen, if she were alive, Al estimates, would be in her eighties now. At least. Wasn’t she gray-haired way back when? What ever happened to her? Someone else had the second-graders by the time Al’s younger sister started in the grade school. This Ulrich woman couldn’t possibly have been Al’s teacher. But isn’t it funny how a voice on the phone could bring back what hasn’t crossed a man’s mind in decades?
Al lifts his battered metal tool box and crunches across the brittle brown grass to the front of the farmhouse. A blue jay shrieks nearby; a crow caws in a far-off field. Al hears no dogs, no cattle. His boots thump on the wooden steps and then on the solid flooring of the tidy porch.
Before he gets to the welcome mat, the storm door swings outward, sending a flash of reflected sunrise into the face of the Furnace Man. It blinds him for a moment. He sets down the tool box. He takes one step more and gazes upon the woman in the doorway. Her white hair, parted in the center and gleaming with a fresh brushing, rests on the shoulders of a dark, down-filled jacket zippered and snapped all the way up to her chin. She is wearing denim jeans or overalls; on her feet are rugged leather boots.
The old woman grins. Her eyes sparkle like the sun-blessed frost on her lawn. “Oh, Alton!” she says. “My, but haffn’t you grown!” She is a step above him. She levelly looks him in the eye. Then she leans forward and puts a peck upon the man’s whiskery cheek.
“Frau Olhausen!” Al replies, in a whisper. And, this time, he takes her in his arms, and he warmly returns the kiss.
♦
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