(An adventure in the past, with Letty, Stephen and their childhood friends, during the 1930s. I may continue writing about Luna City in the past, when I finish the 12th chronicle. It’s a place very dear to me, but several present-day story arcs are coming to a natural conclusion.)

From – The Secret Life of Brownies

Letty McAllister was just eleven years old and her older brother Douglas was thirteen, in summer of the year that the brownies appeared in Luna City; 1932. That was the third year of the great Depression, although Letty and Douglas and their friend, Stephen Wyler were barely aware of that. Something to do with a stock market crashing Letty gathered from overhearing adults talk it over, with somber faces and worried voices.

“I think it means the Fat Stock Show,” Stephen Wyler assured them, late in 1929 when Letty and Douglas consulted with their friend. He was the son of a rancher, and fairly familiar with matters to do with cattle and other beasts of the Wyler Ranch.

“Are you certain?” Douglas asked, not entirely convinced. The adults seemed to have been most particularly worried. “I don’t believe there are cattle in New York City.”

“Perhaps it was some other kind of stock,” Stephen conceded.

As it turned out, the depression had nothing at all to do with the San Antonio Fat Stock Show. What it meant to Luna City was that lean times came in, hung up coat and hat and decided to sit for a long spell. It meant that local small ranchers and farmers went bust, losing home and properties to foreclosure by the bank, and then a cascade of failing banks and small businesses shutting up for good.  All that, and for Luna City it also meant an increase of bums and hobos drifting through, looking for work or just a free meal. Since no one had any money to spare to hire farm hands, the hoboes mostly drifted on, although there were some who were agreeable to doing chores by the day in exchange for a few meals and a place under a roof to sleep.

The McAllister siblings and Stephen Wyler, together with a handful of friends from school, had built themselves a clubhouse with odd planks and tree branches brought down by winter floods. They settled on a sheltered declivity in the riverbank not far from the burnt-out ruins of an old mansion on a hill commanding a view of the river, and the washhouse and bathrooms for a tourist camp which had never really gotten off the ground. The owners of the derelict tourist camp had long given up on the property, even before the stock market crash, and left the cabins and the paved space to molder away, baked in the harsh Texas summer sunshine, and blasted by winter winds, perhaps proving that even in good times, the tourist camp wouldn’t have made a go of it. Nothing had lived anywhere near the owl-haunted ruins of the old mansion for decades, although there was a shed, leaning perilously to one side, and an icehouse with thick and insulated walls built into a sloping hillside not far from a pile of burnt timbers and brick, tangled over with mats of wild morning glory vines. Stephen, Douglas, their tag-along acolyte Artie Vaughn, and Letty’s friend, Retta Livingston sometimes dared aspirants to membership in their private club to brave the spiders and other critters who inhabited the ruins of the roofless bathhouse and the icehouse as a condition of membership. The old icehouse was a dank cave, hidden among the brush; so far, no one had accepted the dare.

It was Retta, who lived with her family on a small farm on the outskirts of Luna City, who first mentioned the brownies. Retta and Letty were in the same Girl Scout troop, a troop led by Mrs. Rowbottom, who was the wife of the Reverent Calvin Rowbottom, the minister of the Methodist church in Luna City.

“Mrs. Allison says that she is being visited at night by helpful brownies,” Retta commented one afternoon, when they had gathered at the clubhouse to share out a little bag of penny candy that Stephen Wyler had brought with his allowance money. “Like the story that Mrs. Rowbottom told us about brownies coming in at night to do chores for people who leave them a bowl of milk or something.”

“Who’s Mrs. Allison, when she’s at home?” Stephen asked, flippantly. “And how can she tell?”

Retta regarded Stephen with an impatient expression. “Mrs. Allison lives across the small pasture from us – on the edge of town. Her husband finally got a job helping to build that big ol’ Hoover dam in Arizona and such. They have a little boy – Samuel, but he caught polio this summer and it took him really bad. The doctors said to keep him in in the hospital in Karnesville, he was that bad sick. He even got put in that iron lung machine for a week! They were afraid that he might die of the polio, or be paralyzed for life. Mrs. Allison, she tries to keep real cheerful about his condition, but she told my ma that he might never be able to walk again. Mrs. Allison, she goes to Karnesville purt’ near every day on the bus, so that she can see to Samuel in the hospital. He’s only six years old – the same age as my little brother.”

“What about the brownie visiting?” Letty was fascinated. The bus to Karnesville came by the McAllister house, and the Tip-Top Ice House and Gas around nine o’clock on weekday mornings, ten on Saturdays. (The bus didn’t run on Sundays.)

“It was right curious,” Retta answered. “Mrs. Allison went to Town Square to wait for the bus to come … as she didn’t want to miss it. It stops by Dunsmore’s grocery …”

“Only it isn’t Dunsmore’s grocery anymore,” Artie Vaughn added, rather unnecessarily.

“We know that!” Letty pointed out, “It’s just that the man who owns the grocery store ever since Mr. Dunsmore went to prison and had to sell up never has anyone working there who stays long enough for anyone to remember their names. They don’t stay in Luna City long enough to matter.”

“Well, anyway, there was a lot of people standing around, and Mrs. Allison said that she came away in such a rush that she had forgotten to let the chickens out, and to stack up the cord of firewood that was delivered. She talked about that and so much else … but when she came home after dark that evening … she saw that all the wood had been stacked ever so neatly, the chickens had been let out – and then put away again. There was a little note, left where the milkman had delivered two quarts of milk to the ice-box. One of the bottles was gone, but the note said ‘We took the milk, we needed it for the baby’ and just a little scrawled ‘B’ for a signature.”

“No one ever locks their doors around here,” Stephen remarked. “It could have been anyone, walking in.” He looked around at the ring of faces. They were gathered in the Club – a little ramshackle tipi of branches and odd planks brought down by previous winter’s floods leaned up against a mostly-dead cottonwood tree. Stephen, the McAllisters and their other friends had built it for a secret clubhouse, in an out-of-the-way bend in the river, below Luna City. “Maybe Mrs. Allison out to start locking her doors when she goes to spend all day, every day at the hospital. There are a lot of scurvy rogues on the tramp, you know. Just to be on the safe side.” Stephen had picked up the phrase “scurvy rogues” from an adventure book about pirates on the Spanish Main and used it at every opportunity.

“Well, she does at night,” Retta allowed. “Being that she is all alone in the house, and her husband is away…”

“She ought to have a dog,” Artie Vaughn said. “Dogs are the best guardian. Like Rin-Tin-Tin…”

“Yes, but a dog would chase her chickens, less’n she kept an eye on it,” Retta replied. “And anyway … maybe a dog would chase away the brownies. And then they wouldn’t ever come back.”

“Did they?” Letty was fascinated – it all seemed as if a fairy story was coming to life – and in Luna City! “Come back again to Mrs. Allison?”

“They did!” Retta replied, triumphantly. “She thought at first that one of her neighbors was playing a little game with her, so she left a note on the stoop under the empty milk bottles. She thanked the Brownies for stacking the wood and looking after the chickens, and asked if  they would dust the parlor and hanging out the wet washing for her, as she wouldn’t have time to do it in the morning before she went to Karnesville … and when she came home, the laundry was all dry and folded up neatly, and the parlor was as clean as a whistle!”

“Was it a neighbor, funning with her?” Artie was deeply impressed.

“She doesn’t think so,” Retta answered. “And she says now that she wouldn’t do anything to frighten them or chase them away. The Brownies have been such a help when she is so worried about little Sammy, it doesn’t matter to her who they are or where they came from. She leaves a note for them about the chores that need doing while she is away, and a bottle of milk, every morning. She also leaves them bread, cookies, and other things to eat. And every evening when she comes home, the chores are done, and the milk and food she left for the Brownies is gone.”

“That sounds like a miracle,” Letty ventured, and Retta nodded.

“It’s someone doing a good deed, without wanting any credit for it,” Douglas agreed. He was older than the other children by two years, thoughtful and intelligent. He was their natural leader, because he could see and understand aspects and matters of the larger world, matters that the others frequently found baffling. “But look, guys… (and Douglas used that generic denominator to the Club, although two of them were girls.) … do your brownies in the stories have babies among them? They said in that first note – they needed milk for a baby.”

Letty shook her head. “Mrs. Rowbottom never said anything about baby brownies.”

“I don’t think they do have babies,” Letty replied, after a long pause. “They are just sort of helpful spirits.”

“Look, guys,” Douglas continued. “I can believe in being helpful. Neigborly. I can believe that someone is helping Mrs. Allison, but I don’t believe in helpful spirits – brownies, elves, Santa Claus or any other fancy. That’s not logical in the real world.”

There was a YA novel that my mother had a cherished copy of – likely a first edition, because I vividly remember the dust jacket painting in the 1930s commercial style – a pair of teenagers on horseback, in a landscape that was very clearly California’s back country. There was a gnarled live oak tree behind them, some ranges of green trees that looked like a citrus orchard, and a range of purple mountains on the horizon. Mom had her own bookplate pasted into the inside cover of that copy – a black and white picture of a cowboy on a horse, swinging a lariat. That book gravitated from Granny Jessie’s house through three or four houses where we all lived, until it finally was destroyed in the 2003 Paradise Mountain fire, which burned Mom and Dad’s retirement home to the ground, along with just about all the inherited memorabilia and books from both sides of the family. I had a go at replacing some of the books which had been lost, but I was stymied for years at remembering the name and author. And things happened: Dad passed away in 2010, and Mom fell catastrophically some years after that. She has been paralyzed from the shoulders down ever since. She had to go to a nursing home, and then to my sister’s home. The retirement house had to be sold, all the furniture and fittings dispersed among the family, sold at an estate sale or given away … which is irrelevant to this essay, but for the fact that that book was the one which I never got around to replacing.

I couldn’t remember the title of that book, or the author, although I could remember such things as the name of the protagonist, his friends, the general plot, and the fact that there was a map of the relevant area in the book. His name was Billy, his cousin from the big city was Penny, his horse was named Querida, and the family name was Deane – they lived on a ranch in the back country of Northern San Diego County, as it was then. He had a good friend in a boy from the local Indian reservation, and the plot involved dangerous smuggling from over the border, and an earth tremor which had somehow rerouted the natural springs which watered the Deane ranch. Such is my erratic memory – one which Mom once compared to an untidy filing cabinet, full of curious odds, ends and strange but true facts, but all jumbled together in no particular organized order. Now and again, I tried out a search using these bare factoids, but nothing ever turned up, until I threw out the question to the regulars at the Sunday morning book thread at Ace of Spades HQ – and yay – a miracle!

A regular reader there applied those various sketchy details out to a better search engine and came up with the title and author name! Hurrah! The book was titled The Singing Cave, by one Margaret Leighton Carver, who apparently had a good long run as a writer of young adult historical fiction and biographies for about twenty years. The Singing Cave, originally released in 1945 was one of her first popular novels. She lived in California, which accounted for the local west-coast color. I found a reasonably-priced copy at Abe Books and ordered it at once. Not only was there a certain sentimental value for me – but that in many ways the plot and setting was in a California long-gone, and even fading in memory as those who recall it as children and teenagers in the 1930s and 40ies pass from this mortal coil. There once was a California of ranches and small farms,  orchards of citrus trees surrounded by windbreaks of eucalyptus, olive trees and grapes for raisins and wine, dairy farms, plantations of olive trees, almonds and other specialty crops, interspersed with small towns of comfortable early 20th century houses, modest suburbs and the occasional grand estate in Pasadena, Santa Barbera, or San Marino, established by a scattering of old wealth who loved the mild climate. I was around to see the last few bits of pre-WWII California, which my parents remembered from their own growing up, before it was all swamped in miles and miles of development sprawl and strangled by new freeways. The California that my parents knew and loved, and that I remember most fondly is all but gone – the world described in The Singing Cave is saved from the wreck like a bit of flotsam, a window into a previous time, and a reflection of the way that things used to be.

(Now that  I am mostly recovered from a ghastly cold, and have managed to finish the notes for West Toward the Sunset, I am back to work on Luna City. Herewith part of a chapter called Fame, wherein Joe Vaughn becomes a literary sensation. For all the wrong reasons, of course.)

“I thought you should know, cher,” remarked Richard’s boss, Lew Dubois, the C-suite level manager who had become at least a much of a friend over the years of their acquaintance, “That Anne’s good friend – you will recollect Madame Creighton Doyle, who writes the novels most romantic and amusing? Her newest novel is to be launched upon her millions of breathlessly waiting fans tonight. Alas, the formal party sponsored by her publisher will be in New York, and not here.”

“Oh, the best-seller. Yes, I recall – and I honestly I can’t say that I mind in the least,” Richard replied. When he cast his mind back to the previous year, he remembered briefly encountering Trish Creighton Doyle on several occasions. She was a woman of certain years, given to wearing flowing, chiffon-laden garments. The customary dreamy expression on her countenance suggested that her mind was most usually occupied somewhere other than the here and now – unimaginably far, far from the mundane here and now. “We are simply full up with guests at the moment! Even with forewarning…”

“This is in the nature of a forewarning,” Lew replied. “But not as it concerns the Cattleman or the Crystal Room, but rather some of our dear friends. First, I am nearly certain that many of Madame Doyle’s readers will fall upon her latest like famished wolves on a tasty piece of filet mignon … and decide that they simply must see for themselves the enchanted circle of stones … that real circle which was made so many years ago. Madame Doyle has put the pictures which she took of the pagan monument on her website as part of the advance publicity…”

It was mid-morning at the Cattleman Hotel, the hour when Richard and Lew could both be found in Lew’s office, confabulating over what to expect in the near future, about any foreseen and unforeseen events affecting management of the ornate boutique hotel which had dominated the western side of Town Square for more than a century.

“The stone circle at the Age of Aquarius? ‘Strewth – I had better warn the Grants,” Richard considered the prospect with a shudder of horror. “It was bad enough the last time that they were mobbed by visitors; treasure-seekers, ghost-hunters and UFOlogists all converged on the place a couple of years ago. It was a mob scene, culminating in a riot, and then in their old place burning to the ground, although the all-hands brawl had nothing to do with the fire. I couldn’t get a decent nights’ sleep for weeks. At least this time, they have a pleasanter place to live in… and Judy will be thrilled no end, having oodles of imaginative visitors to listen to her tales of New Age this and that…”

“Oh, most definitely, my friend,” Lew agreed. “Tell M’sieu and Madame Grant to expect any number of visitors to their magnificent stone circle…”

“Which, alas, looks much more impressive with the aid of artful photography and the cooperation of nature,” Richard replied. “The marker stones aren’t anything like Stonehenge or Avebury, being about a quarter the size. I’m afraid the baying fans will be quite disappointed…”

“But not in another aspect,” Lew was fiddling with his computer, and the printer across the room whirred and clanked into life. “My wife has sent me a copy of the news release regarding Madame Doyle’s book … the cover was embargoed until the very last minute…”

“So, the Grants will get a boost in visitors to the Age,” Richard mused, as Lew collected a sheet of paper from the printer tray. “And likely the good Colonel Walcott’s reenactor group … I do recollect that the Doyle woman was taking pictures of their encampment and costumed reenactors at the 4th of July celebration in the square … what is the plot of the book? I know someone told me once, but I can’t recall. Something about a woman going through the stone circle and traveling into the past…”

Lew nodded in grim agreement. “A woman of the most modern American times … and discovering fulfillment and love in the arms of a fearless Comanche warrior chieftain of almost two hundred years in the past…”

Richard snorted with rude laughter as Lew handed him the paper. “According to some of the stories I’ve heard from the reenactors, that would have been about the last … oh, f**k me running! Has Joe Vaughn laid eyes on this… this … Oh, my god. He will absolutely lose his mind when he sees this, let alone what Jess will think…”

“I suspect that Madame Vaughn will be amused,” Lew observed. “To discover that her husband has been made into the bare-chested hero on the cover of a best-selling romance…”

“Joe will die of embarrassment,” Richard replied. “And he will most definitely do gross bodily harm to the first person who ventures a jesting remark…My god, I suppose I shall have to tell him. I can only hope that he will not reach out and slaughter me, once I show him this abomination!”

“You will be most tactful, revealing this information, of course,” Lew appeared to have been relieved of a dangerous burden. Someone else would take on the fraught chore of telling Joe Vaughn that a casual picture of him, snapped as he came from a turn in the civic dunk tank the last 4th of July and briefly embraced and kissed Jess, had been utterly transformed by a cover artist … transformed every possible detail save Joe’s clearly recognizable dark, hawklike countenance. He was recognizably on the cover as a bare-chested, dark haired Comanche warrior embracing a slender woman with flowing hair and a diaphanous drape of some kind. Now Richard recalled Araceli’s description of Trish Creighton-Doyle’s output – always the studly romantic hero, embracing a woman clad in something flowy … only the period details and setting distinguished one of the Creighton-Doyle oeuvre from another. Lew appeared to have handed off that dangerous assignment to Richard – a case of discretion being the better part of valor.

“Lew, I will be the very soul of diplomacy,” Richard assured his boss, while taking a good long look at the full-sheet picture of the book cover.

A Time-shattering Romance, from the best-selling author of Those Bolyn Girls.

Richard’s heart sank, right down to the level of his kitchen clogs. For a long moment, he wished that he could hand this off to his redoubtable Aunt Myra, she who was unaccountably adept with blades, small arms, and the physical martial arts, ostensibly a traveling international journalist but most likely an operative for a secretive governmental agency designated M-something-or-other.

In the time before the internet became a thing, when I was mostly stationed at bases overseas, I could rejoice when the base post office put up the mail … we had numbered post boxes, the kind that one sees in the post offices now, with the little locking doors with a small glass window. My post office box was nearly always packed tightly with mail. On really, really good days, there was a pink cardboard slip which meant a package – take the slip to the window and collect your package. Depressing it might be to see a package slip, and the parcel window had already closed on a Saturday afternoon  which meant  waiting until  Monday to get the package. (In Greenland, though, whenever an airplane came in with mail, the post office clerks would call the radio station, and the duty announcer would read out that so many pounds of mail had been received, and the post box numbers who had gotten packages on the air. The post office window would be open for exactly half an hour then, no matter what the day, or hours – and on hearing your box number read out, everyone would beat feet for the post office. This was Greenland – everyone knew to the minute when an aircraft came in, and if it were coming from Stateside, there would be mail on it.)

I subscribed then to a number of magazines – magazines of news and cultural interest, mostly, with some hobby publications among them … and catalogues. Oh, I got catalogs – so many that the post office clerks swore that sometimes they had to wedge my mail into my post box with the aid of a crowbar. There were just so many things that weren’t available to  us through the exchange, or on the local economy. Clothing, books, household goods, hobby materials and supplies, small furniture kits, movies … even certain food items – anything the least bit non-standard had to come by catalog mail order. (In the case of Greenland, there was no local economy, only the souvenir booth on the Danish side of the runway, and the little trading post store, which was about  the size of a corner minimart.)

Of course I was the recipient of catalogs galore, for all the things that couldn’t be obtained locally and for which I had a taste or an interest. One of my very favorite clothing catalogs was the original Banana Republic line, when it was truly a vendor of quirky yet practical travel clothing and accessories. A fair number of their early items were military surplus of all sorts of other militaries, much of which came in color palettes which explored the vibrant spectrum of olive-drab green, tan, brown, gray and dull blue, but which had the benefit of being durable, practical and well-made. The original Banana Republic’s clothing tended to be pricy – rather like LL Bean items of the same era – but ever so worth it in the long run; comfortable, practical fabrics, flattering cuts, and modest – suitable for wear on countries where excessive displays of flesh were not advised – and infinitely variable. The ideal for their kind of traveler, I gathered from their content, was the one who could do a world tour with a single small piece of luggage, and still be comfortably, practically, and tastefully turned out for every possible occasion, from morning trek to see a ruined temple in the jungle to a tea party at an embassy that afternoon. I liked that kind of practicality – liked it very much, although I could only afford a couple of pieces from them. A mid-length khaki drill skirt was one of them, and another was a pair of flat-heeled ballet pumps that I wore all over Europe; the soles were ribbed rubber. Perfect for hiking through places and streets floored with slick stone and cobbles, which – wet or dry – were a hazard. The Banana Republic catalogues were literate, even just fun to read. They stood out among my collection of catalogs for that very reason. I understand that the handful of Banana Republic brick-and-mortar locations were just as spectacular, in décor and design. Alas, I never got to visit one in person. Eventually, the couple who had built the brand sold it to the company which already owned a big nationwide chain and a couple of other brands, and Banana Republic stopped being the quirky, original source for high-quality travel clothing and exotic military surplus. It became just another generic brand of mall-marketed clothes, just like all the other generic, cheaply-manufactured generic mall clothing brands.

I wish that I had kept some of the catalogs, though. Just for sentimental value. Maybe I have – and they are buried out in a box in the garage.

 

08. October 2024 · Comments Off on Now And Again · Categories: Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings

So, another busy week at Chez Hayes – some work for a client, and all but the finishing touches on the WIP, the YA pioneer adventure story, with the working title of West Towards the Sunset. I might make it into a series, in the spirit of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. I loved that series, as a young reader, myself. Not all that fond of the TV series version, which spun radically away from the books in ways large and small. My everlasting conviction has been that historical fiction is a gateway drug into an interest in actual history. I think that more people initially became interested in the American Civil War through reading Gone With the Wind, or in the American Revolution through Johnny Tremain, or any number of other riveting narratives set in other historical periods … so why not throw my own books into the grand mix? My personal motto was always that of the Armed Forces Radio and Television  Service, an enterprise in which I served with  only moderate personal success. (Hey, I got a pension out of it, so, whatever…)

The motto was “To Inform and Entertain” – so it’s my hope that my own books inform and entertain, and perhaps inspire a life-enhancing further interest.

Anyway, West Towards the Sunset is all but done – just a few hundred words to the afterward/postscript, and out to the volunteer beta readers in the next day or so.

In the meantime – coping with a neighborhood concern. A close Aged Neighbor of advanced years and uncertain health passed away in hospital a week ago Friday. We were close – close enough that my daughter was on her Life Alert roster, and we had the names of her next of kin and their phone numbers (most of whom lived several states away.) We regularly walked her dog, Penny the Labradoodle, and had walked with her, when she was in better condition, so frequently that a couple of other neighbors thought that she was my mother. We found a kitten for her, a full sister to Miso, among the collection on the other side of the neighborhood, a fluffy white kitten which she named Snowy, who grew up to be affectionate and spectacularly dog-like, for a cat.

Then Penny the Labradoodle at 15 years old and arthritic, became reluctant to walk more than half a block.  Aged Neighbor fell a couple of times and went no farther than the group mailbox – propped on a walker, to the covert relief of us all. Then she crunched her car fender, and gave up the keys to the car to another neighbor … Anyway – a handful of us in the nearby houses were very fond of Aged Neighbor and kept a careful eye on her.

Aged Neighbor’s family are all touchingly grateful to all of us for having seen to her care and wellbeing. Snowy has been adopted by one neighbor. Another neighbor has a friend who may eventually adopt Penny the Labradoodle. Aged Neighbor’s family all gathered this week to sort out the house. They have no need of her household things, clothes, furniture, objects d’arte and monumental brand-new new cat tree, as they drove from out of state and have full households of their own anyway. We’ve been given a good share of them – including the cat tree! –  either to use for the Daughter Unit’s eventual home, or to pass on to Goodwill. The remainder have been given to other friends and neighbors. That took up the rest of our time this weekend.

And that was my week – yours?