Purple Flat Top
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Purple Flat Top

In Pursuit of a Place

Jack Nisbet

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eBook - ePub

Purple Flat Top

In Pursuit of a Place

Jack Nisbet

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About This Book

When a mining claim on a crumbling cliff of burnt-rose quartzite lured naturalist Jack Nisbet to the northeastern corner of Washington State in 1970, he began a search for an understanding of that open country through stories about the people who lived there and the everyday events he shared with them. Together, these vivid, engaging, and subtly humorous stories evoke the essence of this place. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lwlNisTUyk

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Year
2012
ISBN
9780295804316

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I SLOWED FOR THE SECOND HALF OF THE BIG SWITCH-back on the way down the hill, taking in the scene at the Chewelah town dump as I drifted past. Two fresh dump-truck loads of used bricks dwarfed the other trash heaps. Even though it was early, a brown Pontiac sedan was already backed up between the piles, its trunk open. A lone man sat on a milk crate in front of the rubble, patiently whacking old mortar off a brick with a mason's trowel. As he rocked forward, his bald head shone like burnished leather.
I had seen him around town a time or two—a large man, always alone, with luminous skin and a thoughtful face. I wondered exactly how old he might be—past retirement, certainly, but I couldn't tell whether by years or decades. He wore striped bib overalls, farmer style, but he didn't move like a farmer. Seated on the crate, his weight balanced over his knees, the man looked more like a musician ready to play.
He was still there when I came back up the hill in the late afternoon and turned into the dump for a look around. I walked past the trunk of the Pontiac, counting eight neat rows of bricks laid inside it, and stopped alongside the man in the overalls as a burst of gray mortar sprang away from his trowel.
“Hello,” I ventured.
He looked up, then reached into the breast pocket of his bibs to touch the control button on a hearing aid.
“Second load of the day,” he said, pointing his trowel at the sagging rear of the Pontiac. His words came out in short, smooth bursts that varied oddly in volume. “I've about had enough. Good bricks though. Look at this.”
He plucked one from the pile beside his milk crate and handed it to me. Stamped into the clay was the imprint of the Chewelah Brick Company.
“They used to have a fellow down there named Ehorn who knew his business. I'm Shirley LaMont. Who are you?”
I introduced myself and we shook hands. Shirley's seemed soft and expressive for a man who had just spent all day cleaning bricks. He withdrew his hand and, with a nod that discouraged further conversation, bent back to his work. I took one turn around the dump, listening to the pleasant whangs of his trowel, and left for home.
A couple of months later I stopped by the newspaper office to drop off my weekly column and was greeted by utter chaos. The Chewelah Independent was leaping into the computer age and had hired Kenny Wuesthoff to get their old equipment out of the way. He had transported the linotype machine intact to the local museum, but the ancient printing press was too wide to get out of the building; at the moment of my entry, Kenny was trimming gears and cogs off one side of the beast with his sledgehammer.
I knew this change was in the works and had asked Kenny to save the old layout table that graced the top of the press. It consisted of two sections of heavy wood hinged together, each wide enough to display a pair of open newspapers side by side. Although the surfaces were black with printer's ink, I thought a few sessions with a belt sander might turn the table into a serviceable desk. Now, to protect my interest, I slipped between the secretaries and back to the scene of Kenny's relentless banging.
“Just in time,” he said as the tabletop I was after crashed onto the floor. “Help me get this thing out of here.”
Together we maneuvered the heavy slab out the double doors into the alley. As we leaned it against the outside wall, Shirley LaMont stepped out from behind Kenny's flatbed truck.
“Holy Cow!” shouted Kenny. “It's Jesse James. Should we load this thing right in your car, Mr. James, or would you like it dee-livered?”
Shirley did not reply immediately but continued to inspect the battered hunks of cast iron that were headed for the foundry. As before, he wore striped bib overalls over a long-sleeved khaki shirt, and moved with a slow grace.
“Did you have to break it up so bad?” he asked.
“Get my hammer over here, pronto,” Kenny directed me. “Mr. James needs this load busted down into smaller pieces.”
Shirley chuckled at that, even as he moved on to inspect the odds and ends Kenny had flung into the alley. He stooped to touch a pair of smooth lead ingots once destined to be melted into letters for the linotype machine, and shuffled in a figure eight as he consolidated several hardened lead splatters into a pile beside the ingots. Then a series of forged wrenches, each shaped to deal with a different part of the press, caught his attention.
“Go easy there, Jesse,” said Kenny, as he towed a heavy section of the printing press out the doors. “The wrenches are mine.”
Shirley abandoned the tools to gather up some silvered metallic printing plates that warbled at his touch. Drawing a pair of reading glasses from his bibs, he perused a couple of metal pages silently, then let out a grunt of surprise and walked toward us, reading an advertisement.
COME OUT
of the
KITCHEN
These Hot Days
EAT at the
MANHATTAN
Something good
Every Day
MANHATTAN CAFE
—C. E. LaMont
“That was my dad's place,” Shirley said. “I think he and Mom wrote this up themselves.”
He laid the silvered sheet over by itself and continued his survey. When he reached my layout table, he bent close and ran his fingertips along the inky surface. Motioning me over, he pointed to a line of graffiti scratched on the bottom—“THE CHICAGO KID 1927.”
“Hmmmm,” Shirley said. “I wonder who that might have been.” He straightened and rapped the table smartly with his knuckles. “I believe you'll find this is made out of nicely joined sugar maple planks, all quarter-sawn. You should take good care of it.”
Kenny stepped to the door to fling another armload of scrap toward his flatbed, and Shirley caught his eye like an experienced bidder capturing the attention of an auctioneer, pointing at the printing plate with the ad for his parents' restaurant and at a short stack of glass photo plates I hadn't even noticed. Kenny nodded his OK, adding, “I knew you were going to rob us sooner or later. Anything else we can do for you?”
“That will be enough for now, thank you,” Shirley replied.
He methodically wrapped the glass plates in newspaper and loaded them into the trunk of his Pontiac. The ad sheet received special attention in the back seat, where it sang again as he smoothed it against the upholstery. Satisfied with his arrangement, Shirley climbed in and drove away. Kenny, an unusually contemplative look on his face, turned to me.
“I've known a lot of people who like to pick up scrap, but Mr. LaMont there has what I'd call a broader interest.”
Over the next several years, Shirley LaMont lingered around the periphery of my doings, and our brief encounters only whetted my curiosity. Once, on my way home, I spotted him sifting through junk at the town dump; when I stopped, he greeted me cordially and explained the market value of a hand-cranked coffee grinder he had just raked out of a pile. Another day, I happened to glance out the window of the hardware store just in time to see him present a little girl with a perfectly folded square newspaper cap. Shirley adjusted the hat on the child's head, then sauntered into the post office, wearing an identical paper cap of his own. At the Valley Fair one August, he appeared as the croupier of a penny-toss game. Sporting a green eyeshade and a butcher's apron, he ramrodded the action around a sheet of plywood painted with a neat grid of red and blue numbers.
“There's a man for adventure,” he called out when he saw me. “Come on over here and take a chance.”
Every now and then, when an opportunity presented itself, I would ask people around town what they knew about Shirley. One local merchant told me that Shirley came from an island in the Caribbean, where he had held some kind of position in society. That was bunk, a nurse at the hospital countered—if he was so rich, why was he washing the hospital's linens in a laundry behind his house? Her husband took issue: “Come on, all Shirley ever did at his place was cut keys. Well, maybe he did sharpen a few lawn-mower blades on that contraption he had that looked like a hay baler. But only a few. And how could the man run a laundromat when he was never home? All the summers I can remember he was rambling around the countryside with that ding-dong merry-go-round of his.”
A merry-go-round?
“That's right. Hauled it on a flatbed truck from here clear across the Colville Reservation. The guy was never at home.”
At the Oasis, I encountered a woman who once worked as a waitress in the Manhattan Cafe. It was just before the Depression, she said, and Shirley's dad was the cook. Shirley was a young man then and would come in sometimes on Saturday night to play banjo or ukulele for the crowd. My friend Walt, who overheard her story, told me that as a kid he used to hang around the Manhattan during those sessions. He would wait for Shirley to take a break so that he could sneak up to the bandstand and finger a few chords on the banjo.
Late one winter Tom and I landed a job remodeling a house just up the street from Shirley's place. On a March morning during a period of freeze-thaw-freeze that had left the ground all crunchy and heaved up, I found myself stretched out underneath the reclamation project, trying to jack up a sagging girder. The house was an old one, supported by stone pillars here and there. Beyond the warped timber, my visible world consisted of a one-foot strip of daylight along the bottom of the walls. I had taken the first couple of pumps on my hydraulic jack when slow, grinding footsteps announced a visitor to the job site.
Twisting my head a few inches, I saw a rubber-tipped cane probing the edge of my under-house world. Behind it two brown Hush Puppies gingerly stepped across crushed ice crystals. Thick white wool socks billowed around their tops. The shoelaces were untied, and above them flapped a vertical pattern of hickory-striped pants. The Hush Puppies stopped, and I could hear heavy breathing above. Then Shirley's voice spilled out, lustrously projected like a big band singer spitting out a novelty song.
“What d'you know? Black-backed three-toed woodpeckers have three toes. They show up on recent burns to feast on the fresh larvae of bark beetles. Anyone who knows last summer's Rainbow Lake fire can have another go at it by walking up there this spring and watching the woodpeckers work to and fro on all the beetles that have moved into the burned trees. You can note all your regular favorites— sapsucker, flicker, hairy, downy, pileated—and some funny ones besides. So! Don't forget to count those toes.”
Shirley began to laugh then, a deep rumble that grew as it moved up from his belly. He had me all right, pinned under the house while he pinwheeled the words from my latest newspaper article into a ditty. I wriggled my way out from the crawl space to share the joke; Shirley waggled his head and rapped his walking stick against the side of the house as he repeated, “Don't forget to count those toes!” Then he took three steps, leaned on his cane, and picked up a bent nail. A few more steps and he nabbed two rusted spikes that I had pulled from a rotting skirt board. It had been a long skirt board, and Shirley swatted at a whole line of twisted nails with his stick, corralling them into a pile.
“Such waste,” he said. “Don't know if I want to have a fellow that doesn't bother picking up his nails to work for me or not. Some of these are hardly even bent.”
I couldn't miss the fact that Shirley was breathing hard from his effort. His voice wheezed, and his lips, usually full and expressive, had faded to thin liver.
“Listen,” he said, “I've got a little job over at my house that needs finishing. Just a matter of a few bricks on a hearth. Half a day's work, I'd say. Come over and see me after you get done on this place.”
I had to tell Shirley that I was going to be tied up right here for two or three months.
“That's all right,” he said. “I'll keep track of you. I suppose we'll have enough time.”
Shirley was as good as his word, visiting several days a week to offer suggestions. He thought the studs we were using looked awful warped. The drain field was a joke—how could liquid leach from a pipe that lay below the water table six months of the year? And certainly he had never seen anybody cast aside so many good nails. “Careless, careless,” he grumbled.
Sometimes I would be on the verge of getting upset with him, but he would back off, have a hearty laugh at my expense, and pull a section of some outdated newspaper from his back pocket. Then we would talk about things that led us far away from the job site—the gold mine over in Republic, say, or how to properly stew a rabbit—but never, when I thought back on it, anything very personal. I really wanted to ask Shirley about that carousel he was rumored to have, but there was something about his manner—a reticence that hinted at deep reserves—that kept me from ever bringing it up.
As the framing of the remodel job closed in, Shirley's social visits became less frequent. I hadn't seen him in several weeks when I called him about the job he wanted finished.
“Come in the morning, but not too early,” he said. “Bring your trowels and some mortar mix. I believe I have enough bricks to see us through.”
I waited until almost ten to make my appearance. Shirley's home was a modest farmhouse that he had modernized with brick courses up to the bottom of the windows. The job wasn't entirely completed; a sheet of plywood slanted upward where the front steps belonged. Beside it lay a dozen or so sash weights from outdated double-hung windows that looked a lot like weights Tom and I had removed from the house up the street.
I walked around to the side yard, where a series of outbuildings and lean-tos sprawled out behind the garage. The complex was roofed with a crazy quilt of multicolored tin, and my eyes fell on a vintage ore cart filled with rusting automobile starters and alternators. Beyond the cart a walkway led into a maze of used bricks and sawmill slabs stacked waist-high. I was edging back for a closer look when Shirley's wife, Doris, tiny and quiet, cleared her throat from the side door of the house. I jumped to attention.
“He's inside,” she said, holding the door for me. Shirley was parked in an easy chair in the living room, the tube from an oxygen tank taped beneath his nostrils. He had lost weight, and his flesh sagged. It took some effort for him to reply when I asked him how he was doing.
“Not worth a damn,” he said. “My stomach feels like a peeled onion, and my feet are swelling up like balloons. They want me to check into the hospital for a bunch of tests, but I know once I go in there, it's going to be awful hard to get out.”
He paused to catch his breath, closing his eyes and inhaling shallowly through his nose. Sprinkled around the room were recent family photos of children and grandchildren, gathered from around the country. Shirley's rubber-tipped cane rested against the wall near his chair, and a black leather-bound daybook sat within reach on a small table.
He opened his eyes and lifted his head. “But that's enough of that. Right there's what we need to talk about,” he pointed behind me to a small fireplace in the corner. The simple firebox was surrounded by cut terrazzo triangles that splayed outward in a stunning sunburst—rays of ivory and smoke, fawn and ochre, rose and purple, all polished to show their distinctive chips of local marble. I rubbed my palm along the smooth surface and tight mortar joints in admiration.
“I did that,” Shirley said. “But I never had the time to finish the base for it. I want you to lay those last few bricks along the hearth. You can just set those boxes there off to the side and get started.”
The hearth was practically hidden beneath an array of cardboard boxes. As I began moving them out of the way, I saw that the first one was completely full of postcards, topped by a tinted photo of the Idaho Queen ferry plying the St. Joe River.
“Nice card,” I said.
“Yes it is,” agreed Shirley, momentarily perking up. “Might be from my parents' honeymoon. Clarence and Nellie. You know how busy they were around then? My mother married Clarence in Coeur d'Alene in nineteen and nine, gave birth to me in Terre Haute, Indiana, in nineteen and ten, and managed to have my brother, Delmar, in Spokane in nineteen and eleven. My dad cooked, you know, and bounced around. What did we count once, twenty-seven different restaurants?”
Shirley sank deeper into his chair, and any interest in his wandering parents seemed to drift away. As I returned the Idaho Queen to the box, I noticed that the card beneath it showed another vessel, “The World's Largest Auto Ferry,” groaning under the weight of three steam locomotives. I thought I'd ask Shirley about that one, too.
“Yes, yes,” he said, waving me off. “My folks took me on that in 1917 when my dad was cooking in Yerington, Nevada, during the war. That was the way you visited San Francisco in those days. Of course I remember it. I was already in school t...

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