I must have looked even more worried, if possible, for he added, as if it would buck up my spirits, “Sometimes she barks worse than she bites. Sometimes.”
By way of Gram, that was the kind of statement I had learned to put in the category of free advice and worth just what it cost. At the moment there was nothing I could do about an aunt who either barked or bit, so I took a look around to see what “helping” Herman in the greenhouse might consist of. Except for possibly scrubbing the blotchy windows, nothing suggested itself, inasmuch as he had turned the glass shed into a greatly more cozy place than, say, my rat hole of an attic. Long wooden shelves along either side handily held not only the miniature forest of plants he had started in pots, but garden trowels and snippers and other tools and a colorful array of fertilizer boxes and so on, a coffee thermos, a cigar box, and a stack of books by Karl May, who evidently had more Deadly Dust up his sleeve after that Montana buffalo hunt. Stashed in a corner was an old gray duffel of the seabag sort, doubtless holding more treasures the Kate had banned from the house.
Growing interested in spite of myself, I made the offer the lukewarm way—“Uhm, anything I can do?”—a person does just to be polite.
“Yah, keep me company.” He dragged out a wooden fruit box from under the shelf for me to sit on. “Tell me about Montana,” he pronounced it pretty close to right. “Cowboy life.”
? ? ?
THAT GOT ME STARTED, almost as if I was back on the dog bus telling yarns free and easy. I regaled Herman with this, that, and the other about life on the Double W, from riding out with the actual cowboys to check on the cattle, to hunting magpies along the creek, making him exclaim I was a pistoleer, by which I figured he meant gunslinger. Puffing away on his stogie and babying his plants with spoonfuls of fertilizer and careful irrigation from a long-necked watering can—a couple of times I interrupted myself to go and fill it for him from the spigot at the back of the house—Herman listened to all of it as though I were a storyteller right up there with his idol who wrote the pile of books about cowboys and Indians.
In the end, my storying naturally led around to the whole thing, Gram and me being chucked out of the cook shack and her into the charity ward and me onto the dog bus, when I could just as well have been earning wages in the hayfield the entire summer, and while I couldn’t quite bring myself to lay out my full fear about the poorfarm looming in her future if medical things did not go right, and orphanage starkly in mine, he grasped enough of the situation to tut-tut gravely again.
“A fix, you are in,” he said with a frown that wrinkled much of his face. “The Kate didn’t tell me the all.”
Somehow I felt better for having poured out that much of the tale, even if it went into squarehead ears, so to speak. At first I was suspicious that Herman resorted to a kind of Indian speakum in talking about anything western, but no, it became clear that was genuinely his lingo from the old country mixed in with the new. Whatever the travels of his tongue, I was finding this big husky open-faced man to be the one thing about Wisconsin that I felt vaguely comfortable with, despite his evident quirks and odd appearance. In most ways, he was homely as a pickle. That elongated face and the prominent teeth, taken together with the cockeyed gaze magnified by his glasses, gave him the look of someone loopy enough that you might not want to sit right down next to, although of course there I was, plotched beside him like just another potted plant. Together with everything else in the humid greenhouse, he himself seemed to have sprouted, his shoulders topping my head as he stretched from his stool here and there to reach into his menagerie of vegetation, his big knuckles working smoothly as machine parts in crimping a leaf off a tomato plant near its root—“Pinch their bottoms is good for them,” he told me with a naughty grin—or tying a lagging bean stalk to a support stick. The dappled light streaming through the glass ceiling and walls brought out the silver in his faded fair hair, which I suspected made him older than Aunt Kate, although there was no real telling. I’d have bet anything gray hair did not stand a chance on her; she would rather, as not much of a joke had it, dye by her own hand.
About then, as I was yammering away with Herman, I noticed a strange smudge of some sort on the back of my hand. Dirt is to be expected in a greenhouse, so I went to brush it off, but when that didn’t get rid of it, I peered more closely. Then gasped. A ghostly scrap of face, an eye clear and direct, feminine eyebrow and ladylike cheekbone distinct in outline, had scarily materialized on my skin. Yanking my hand away as if burned, I sent Herman one hell of a look. Whatever this stunt was, I didn’t like having it pulled on me.