Chapter 1: The Edge of the World

Note: This is a work of historical fiction. As such, names of historical characters, places, products, events, movies, and music have been used to set the context and reality of the time. But the story and characters are fiction. While much of the action is based on actual events or experiences in my life, ultimately, it is all fiction. Perhaps it will entertain. Perhaps it will take you to a similar time in your own life. Perhaps in rare instances, it will enlighten.

CORNFIELDS AND WHEAT FIELDS and bean fields and God knows what other kind of fields. I wished I was young enough to get excited about seeing one more cow.

“What is that awful smell?” I moaned, rolling up my window. My eleven-year-old sister held her nose and glared at me.

“He who smelt it dealt it,” she snarked.

“That’s enough, Kat,” Dad said. “We just passed a rendering plant. Think of it as a substitute for the smell of refineries.”

“Great,” she growled and hid her face in her sleeve.

It took more than a mile for the smell to fade. I rolled the window back down. It was too hot to leave closed. For the end of June, weather in Chicago and Northern Illinois had been unseasonably hot for over a week. Perfect time to be moving across the damn state.

I guess I sighed a little and started fiddling with my camera bag. I needed to get a couple cassettes of film rolled from the spool or I wouldn’t be able to record our big move, first impressions of the new town, and all that. I put the can and the spooler into my dark bag and then reached into the bag with a couple of empty cassettes. I always felt a little more peaceful when I was rolling film. I couldn’t see a thing that was happening, but I could feel exactly what I needed for thirty-six exposures.

It wasn’t like this move was really a bad thing. Dad had been laid off work at the refinery two years ago. There was some big consolidation that I didn’t understand when I was fourteen. All I knew was that Dad was out of work and we were living on government surplus again. I didn’t mind the peanut butter or the cheese, but the powdered eggs and powdered milk were just gross. Dad went into manpower retraining, a great program started by John F. Kennedy. He collected unemployment for as long as he was in the retraining program. He got trained in refrigeration and air conditioning, but he’d never found a job. He’d been doing odd jobs and maintenance work during the past few months.

Mom hadn’t been idle. She’d been studying correspondence courses for the past few years and took two terms at Garrett Theological Seminary. For the past school year, she’d been gone to Evanston three nights a week and Dad picked up most of the cooking and making sure Kat and I were in school on time. She was ordained as a deacon in the Methodist Church at Annual Conference two weeks ago and was appointed to Tenbrook Methodist Church at the edge of the damned world. One more step and you fall off into Iowa.

It was really a big deal. Mom was the first woman ordained and assigned a church by the Methodists in Illinois. I guess before long we’d be calling them United Methodists when the unification with the EUBs went through. Then her status would change because the EUBs had already ordained a woman. Mom knew her and I guess they were friends, even though she was all the way down in Springfield.

Mom thought I was going to follow in her footsteps and be a preacher. I’d worked through a lot of her coursework with her as she studied. Maybe if there was a ministry of photography, I might follow through with that, but I just couldn’t see preaching as a career. I wasn’t that committed. It’s just that the closing program at Senior High Institute at Asbury Woods last summer was pretty high pressure and I said I’d become a minister. Well, it’s not a binding contract.

Anyway, Mom got assigned to this little church and we packed up the family to move. At least they sent a truck for our furniture and stuff. We didn’t have to do all the moving and hauling. I packed every item in my darkroom myself, though.

Kat hadn’t taken kindly to the move.

“You’re making me leave all my friends! I hate you!” she’d argued.

“Name one,” Mom said as she sat to face my sister.

“Um ... Janie.”

“Janie who told you that you were fat and she never wanted to see you again?”

“But Marcie.”

“Marcie moved to Wisconsin last year.”

“Angela is still there.”

“Angela is a very nice girl and I’m glad you think of her as a friend, but you’ve never attempted to get together, to play, or even to go see a movie.” Kat continued to sulk. “Honey, we’re doing this to get a fresh start where you can make real friends and not be afraid to go outside all the time. Things have been getting bad in the city. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more riots this summer. I don’t want my children to be too afraid for their lives to go outside.”

“It’s not fair.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t, but God will take care of us. You’ll make some real friends and will have them all your life.”

I hoped that went for me, too. I’d never been any better at making friends than Kat was. The friends I made were different than us. We never saw each other except at school. A new town out in the country? I could see myself out riding down a country road on my bicycle, stopping to get a picture of some dilapidated barn that spoke of Americana.

Except I didn’t have a bicycle. Mine was stolen last summer and we hadn’t seen any sense in getting a new one that would just be stolen again. There was plenty of public transportation. That was one of the good things about living in the city. I could catch the Lake Shore and be downtown in an hour. But Mom was right. There was always danger around. Especially if it looked like I was carrying anything valuable—like my camera.

I kind of dumped this story on you right in the middle. I should say that I’m Nate Hart. I’m sixteen and will be seventeen in the fall. I’ll be a junior at Tenbrook High School. Go Trojans. Why the hell would anyone name their sports team after the losers of the biggest war in ancient history? Or a condom. Take your pick.

You already met my little sister Katherine. We call her Kat—and she scratches like one, too. Mom, Rev. Joyce Hart. Dad, Richard Hart. I’ve got two older sisters. Deborah is twenty-four, married, and has a new baby. Her husband, Sergeant John Lindal, is in the army and they live on base near Kansas City at Fort Leavenworth. We’re all pretty worried about him because there’s always a risk of being sent to Vietnam soon. They’re really ramping up some gnarly stuff there. Personally, I wouldn’t go. If I get drafted, I’ll move to Canada. No way am I carrying around a gun instead of a camera. My niece’s name is Cameron, by the way. Deborah jokes that she named her after me.

Naomi joined up. She’s twenty-two and is in officer training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. She says she wants to be a pilot, but fat chance of that ever happening. She’ll probably end up married and pregnant, too.

Yeah, apparently Mom and Dad decided to take a break before they launched me. They weren’t sure they wanted any more kids after the war. World War II that is. I wasn’t born until ‘49. Kat in ‘55. She might have been an accident.

So, we’re getting close to the end of June. In two years, I’ll graduate as a proud member of the class of ‘68. At least I hope I’ll be proud of it. I don’t know a single person in Tenbrook. I’m told it has a population of about 750 and my class has 55 kids in it. I’ll make 56—at least until someone gets pregnant. I don’t know a soul there and I don’t expect I’ll meet anyone before school starts.

I rolled three cassettes of film and loaded one in my 35mm SLR from Sears. Don’t laugh about that. Sears in Chicago has a great camera department and this camera is made by Ricoh. It took me over a year to save up the money to buy it. I wouldn’t have made it then if it weren’t for Uncle Nate, Mom’s brother, my namesake. He’s the one who got me my first camera when I was about Kat’s age. I still have my Kodak Brownie Hawkeye he gave me for my tenth birthday. Mom was shocked that he’d buy me such an expensive gift, but I loved it. I’ve been hooked on photography ever since. Anyway, when he heard I was saving for a new SLR, he slipped me $100. Unlike our side of the family, Uncle Nate always seemed to have a little extra money. I overheard Mom whisper something about it being mob money. I don’t know what he did for it—or them.

I was still using my Brownie when I entered a 4-H photography competition. Dad’s friend, Mr. Harris, had a darkroom and offered to develop my photos and print them for me. I sat with his son, Dennis, while he and Dad went into the darkroom. They chose the photos off the four rolls I’d shot—twelve exposure rolls. I was really pleased with them and they won the championship prize at the Will County Fair. Cook County didn’t have a fair, but 4-H was allowed to exhibit at Will County.

My exhibit was slated to go to the state exhibit in Springfield. I got a blue ribbon, but not the championship purple. We went over to see Mr. Harris to show him the ribbon. That’s when Dennis told me that the only reason I won at all was because of what his dad did in the darkroom. That lit a fire under me and I checked out a book from the library on film processing and darkroom techniques.

The next time I saw Mr. Harris, I asked him if he’d show me his darkroom and teach me how to develop film. He was impressed that I already knew the terminology and was so interested in learning the process. About once a month, I was allowed to go to Mr. Harris’s house to develop my film and print pictures. I found out Dad was paying for my supplies and was relieved that I didn’t have to shell out for that. I got my first 35mm camera soon after that. It was nothing spectacular. I found it at Camera Warehouse for ten dollars. It was a viewfinder camera with a fixed focus lens, and I soon discovered it needed a different size film than my Brownie. It also had settings for different lens speeds and F-stops.

By the time I was in high school, I was carting a camera around everywhere. That’s when Mr. Harris offered to sell me an old darkroom setup he had. It included various developer tanks, an enlarger and even a small supply of chemicals and paper. I couldn’t wait to get it home. Then it sat in boxes for almost a year because I couldn’t make any place in the house dark enough to call a darkroom. I ruined a lot of film trying. But I learned a lot. That’s when I started going back to the shops in the Loop. We always went to the city a couple of times a year to get clothes and anything we really needed, but I managed to wander off to the pawn shops and the huge Camera Warehouse on Wabash. That’s where I started buying film in cans and winding my own cassettes. Levi, the manager, liked to show young photographers the ropes and always gave me a good deal on film.

Everything was black and white, of course. I finally managed to turn my closet into a reasonable darkroom with my clothes all shoved in my dresser drawers and a portable rack that I got at a church rummage sale. And I started processing and printing my own film. Wow! What a learning curve that was. I was just getting good at it when Mom announced that we were going to move.

Now my entire darkroom was packed in boxes waiting for a new location in our new home.

We got to Tenbrook and found the truck wasn’t there yet. Besides, we were all hungry, so we didn’t bother to even go in to look around. As we drove through town, we saw three bars, but no restaurant. Geez. In Chicago there was at least a White Castle every few blocks. We just drove on fifteen miles to Huntertown, the county seat. It was about four times the size of Tenbrook and we found a café called Gertie’s. It wasn’t much to talk about, but I found out it had great coleslaw. I didn’t order it on purpose. It just came with the burger plate. I was going to ignore it, but decided to give it a taste.

It was sweet and creamy, and I had a new favorite food instantly. The burger and chips were nothing memorable, but I’ve loved coleslaw ever since that day.

After we’d eaten, we headed back to the house. The truck was parked in front, but the driver and crew had taken a lunch break and were gone for almost an hour as we poked around the empty house. They called it a parsonage. It was owned by the church and was just there to house the preacher and his family. Her family in this case. It was a pretty simple layout. We walked into the front and Mom immediately said that the room to the right was her office as there was none in the church itself—a brick structure across the corner. It had a nice big front porch, like most of the other houses in town. It had a big living room and past the office, there was a dining room. A stairway led upstairs and beyond that was a big kitchen with a table.

We headed upstairs. Mom and Dad immediately said the bedroom at the end of the hall was theirs. Next to the stairs was a bathroom. Two front bedrooms looked identical and I gave Kat her choice. She took the one on the right. My closet was actually smaller than the one I had in our rented row house in Calumet City. It would be interesting trying to fit my darkroom into it.

The movers arrived and we spent the rest of the day moving in and organizing our stuff. There was an old Victorian walnut bed in my bedroom. Mom said that the church just had part time ministers the past few years and they only stayed overnight in the parsonage on the weekends.

“I asked if we could keep the bed for you,” she said. “I checked the mattress and it’s much better than the one you had in the city. If you don’t like it, we can still keep your old mattress, but that frame was falling apart and we ditched it. We’ll be making a trip to the dump sometime later this week, so anything that isn’t really usable will go out to the garage.”

I tested the mattress and pronounced it suitable. My old mattress went to the garage. Kat had her own little princess bed and wasn’t about to part with it.

We went back to Gertie’s for dinner and by the time we got home, Kat and I were both ready to collapse into our beds.

I woke up feeling a little disoriented. It was quiet. I mean really damn quiet! No traffic. No trains. No airplanes. I frightened myself for a minute thinking that the rapture had happened and I was left behind. Leave it to God to know I was faking it. Then my room came into focus. I remembered that we moved. Damn! How did people sleep with all this quiet going on?

Then I heard a truck rumble by on Main Street. My ears became more accustomed to picking out different kinds of sounds. I heard birds. And they weren’t just crows. Songbirds like you hear at camp. I grabbed a pair of sweats and stumbled downstairs.

“Oh, good morning, honey,” Mom said. She was sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee and her Bible open. Dad was opposite reading from an Upper Room devotional booklet. I looked around for a clock and found our old familiar kitchen clock hanging above the refrigerator. Six o’clock. The sun was shining. “You’re welcome to join us. I haven’t been out for groceries yet, but you can have coffee if you want some.”

I didn’t usually drink coffee, but if I was going to sit through the morning devotion, I needed something. Dad kept reading, knowing better than to even offer to start over. He finished and Mom prayed, thanking God for bringing us safely to our new home. She made it sound like we’d just arrived in the promised land and I gladly said Amen and stood up as soon as she was finished.

“Why don’t you go out for a run and scout out the neighborhood,” Dad suggested before I escaped.

“A run? Outside?”

The idea was kind of foreign to me. Oh, I ran when I needed to. In the gym. Sometimes we were allowed out on the track at school. It’s not like I’m an athlete, but I guess I’m not in too bad shape. It just sounded weird to go outside and run. You just did not do that in Calumet City. There were too many street toughs, drunks, and a growing number of druggies out there. If you were running, someone was chasing you.

But it sounded kind of cool in its own perverse way. I nodded my head and put my half-full coffee cup in the kitchen sink. I saw a thermometer on the window frame outside. Seventy already. It would be eighty-five this afternoon. If I was going to do this, I’d better do it now. I went up to change into a pair of shorts.

I wasn’t much of a runner when it came down to it, but I saw a bit of the town. When I headed out of town on River Road, I saw a good-sized farm dog sitting by the road ahead of me. I turned around where I was to head back into town. I wasn’t going to depend on my ability to outrun a dog. Maybe on a bicycle.