“Just so it isn’t like jokers wild,” she deadpanned, which I had to admit was pretty good. “Toodle-oo, you two,” she left us with. “I’ll be back when you see me coming,” another echo of Gram that surprised me.
I watched her pick her way to the DeSoto and drive off speedily. Showing less interest in the tomato plant now, Herman peered at me through his specs. “She is off to her hen party. They will yack-yack for hours. Now then,” he luxuriously mimicked that word combination of hers that made less sense the more you thought about it, patting around on himself to find his matches and light up another cigar, as if in celebration of the Kate being gone. He gave me a man-to-man grin. “So how do you like Manito Woc?”
There it was again. “How come you say it that way?”
And again the bucktooth grin turned ever so slightly sly. “It is where Manito walks, you don’t think?”
I shrugged, although I could feel something about this conversation creeping up on me. “Who’s Manito?”
“To be right, it is Manitou,” he amended, spelling it. “You don’t know Manitou?” I couldn’t tell whether he was teasing or for real. “From Indian?”
I was hooked. “Huh-uh. Tell me.”
He blew a stream of smoke that curled in the heavy air. “Gitche Manitou is the Great Spirit.”
“Gitchy,” I echoed but dubiously, wondering if my leg was being pulled.
“Yah, like Gitche Gumee, from the poem?” He looked saddened when I had to tell him I was not up on Hiawatha.
“By the shore of Gitche Gumee,” he recited, his accent thumping like thunder. Again, I had to shrug. “By the shining Big-Sea Water,” he persisted. I shook my head, wishing he would try me on something like “A flea and a fly in a flue . . .”
Despairing of my lack of literary education, he held up crossed fingers. “Longfellow and Karl May were like so. Poets of Gitche and Winnetou.”
“Good for them,” I tried faking hearty agreement to clear dead poets out of the growing crowd of specters in the greenhouse, and get to what I saw as the point. “Then where are any Indians in Manitowoc?”
“Gone.” He waved a hand as if tossing a good-bye. “That is why it is said the spirits walk, hah?”
? ? ?
SUPPOSEDLY IT TAKES one to know one, right? So, then and there, my own sometimes overly active mind, red in the head or however the condition of seeing things for more than they are can best be described, was forced to acknowledge that this odd bespectacled yah-saying garden putterer and henpecked husband, fully five times older than me, had a king hell bastard of an imagination. Possibly outdoing my own, which I know is saying a lot. Wherever Herman Brinker got it from, he’d held on to the rare quality that usually leaves a person after a certain number of years as a kid, to let what he had read possess him. I saw now why Aunt Kate was forever at him about taking to heart too much the stories of Karl May in what seemed to be, well, squarehead westerns. Not that I wanted to side with her, storyteller of a sort that I sometimes turned into. But from my experience of his mental workings so far, notions Herman had picked up out of books did not appear to be condensed from their imaginative extent any at all, let alone properly digested.
? ? ?
PUT IT WHATEVER WAY, this was getting too thick for me, people dead and gone but still strolling around in my cigar-smoking host’s telling of it, as well as shadows on glass flaring to life like lit matches, Manitowocers here, Manitou walkers there—a lot more than potted plants flourished in this greenhouse of his.
I shifted uncomfortably on my fruit box. “Spirits like in ghosts, you mean? Herman, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’re supposed to believe in those.”
“We can believe in Indians, I betcha.” He had me there. I could see him thinking, cocking a look at the dappled shed’s glassy figures, and as it turned out, beyond. “So, paleface cow herders, you know much of. How about—?” He patted his hand on his mouth warwhoop style, mocking the Kate’s charge that he had cowboys and Indians on the brain.
With an opening like that, how could I resist?
“Well, sure, now that you mention it,” that set me off, “I’ve been around Indians a lot,” skipping the detail that the last time, I’d slept through most of a busload of them. Trying to sound really veteran, I tossed off, “I even went to school with Blackfoot kids most of one year at Heart Butte.”
“Heart? Like gives us life, yah?”
“Yeah—I mean, yes, same word anyhow.”
Herman leaned way toward me, cigar forgotten for the moment. “Heart Bee-yoot. Bee-yoot-iffle name. Tell more.”