Just North of Nowhere Read Online Free Page B

Great American Pies Our Specialty!” the Swede stood in the street and stared at the building, then at the sign, then at the building. Back and forth, for ten minutes. A GOOD ten minutes.
    Ken watched.
    The ten minutes up, Olaf got to work. In a couple days there were four fluted columns in place of the plain pillars that had held up the porch roof.
    Olaf covered the columns with more layers of white paint—changed his sign from “Dinner” to “Restrant”—did it himself, thus the personalized spelling—then nailed the white and gold thing to the porch roof and that was that. He was done.
    Through that short summer, Mrs. Tim had sat in a rocking chair by a tree in the street. She attended her knitting, watched her husband labor, and got fatter day by day. She nodded to Ken every morning as he passed on his way to snake the bluffs, but never said anything.
    Ken passed, nights, on his way home, a string of rattlers clacking down his back, and there'd be Olaf Tim, still working. Mrs. Tim, fatter, would nod to Ken as he passed.
    The day the White House opened its door, Ken was there, ready for breakfast.
    After a summer of wondering, breakfast was less than might be expected. The eggs were slippery, hard and shiny, the bacon, limp and chewy. The spuds were just north of raw. All the grub smelled like wood shavings and turpentine and the coffee, soapy and hot, tasted like what paint might. He figured things would improve when the place was broke in a little.
    Disappointed or not, Ken paid with a hard bounty dollar. He took his change and left a nickel; said he'd probably be back. Mrs. Tim was nowhere he could see. Her chair was gone from the street.
    Later that morning, while Ken was in the woods that verged on the Amishman Amos Dreibelbies's place up on the west bluff, two things—among many—happened in town: Mrs. Tim gave birth to the boy that had been making her fatter and fatter. She had screamed through a night-long delivery over at Doc's parlor. Once the boy came out, she told Doc that if the young one lived, he ought be called Timothy.
    “Timothy Tim?” Doc said. By then she was asleep.
    The other thing that happened was Olaf Tim blew his head off. After serving that first meal, Olaf dragged his wife's rocker into the new kitchen, took off both boots, sat them by the stove, stuck his double-barrel into his beard and pulled both triggers with his two big toes. Took doing, but folks were like that then: determined.
    Mrs. Tim was fine. She got one of the layabouts to clean up, repaint the kitchen and fix the mess on the ceiling. She hired a fat girl to take the money and tend baby Timothy Tim while she cooked. The Restrant reopened the day after the funeral. That day she started rising at 2:30 in the A.M. to make the great American pies promised on the sign her husband had ordered from Mankato.
    “A man promises, py Gott someone’s got to keep it,” she told Young Ken her first day on the job. She shoved a slice of apple in front of him and waited.
    Ken agreed: Nora Tim made pretty good pie.
    “But it’s great?” she asked.
    Not wanting her to go barefoot to Olaf’s two-barrel and leave little Timothy a whole orphan, Ken took another bite, considered, then nodded. “Ya. Great,” he said.
    Since Bluffton was in America, that covered that: at least one great American pie!
    Pretty soon, the scent of baking smothered the whole river bend end of town from the dark of morning until Nora was damn-well done. In a week, pie smell had rolled the stink of fresh paint all the way to the bank of the Rolling River. Like it did most things, the river flushed the smell out of town.
    Least, that was how Ken pictured it.
    Mrs. Tim and the fat girl made pretty good breakfast, too. Ken reckoned it an improvement over the one Mr. Tim had made, his last thing on earth. Maybe that was why he shot his brains: sudden knowledge that the light of his talent lay in building a thing, not in making it work! And what else was there left