Thicker than Water Page 11

  “Hey!” somebody said. “Eleanore is right. There shouldn’t be so much power in one woman’s hands.”

  “Oh, my Lord,” Elmer said. “This isn’t the bloody CIA, for crying out loud. Listen to yourselves. Power and all that crap.”

  Then Barbara Marina stood and said, “Why should she get all the power? She’s already got all the money.”

  “Yeah,” somebody said.

  “Listen to yourselves,” somebody else said. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”

  Neither could I. This was the last thing I would have expected. I nearly screamed for everybody to be quiet, but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. In fact, they couldn’t come out of my mouth, because lodged deep down in my throat was a sob. I’d cry out if I yelled for everybody to be quiet, and then they would all know how much they’d hurt me, how betrayed I felt. So I just sat there in an emotional state of shock and tried hard to swallow the sobs.

  Stephanie leaned in. “Do you want to leave? Let’s just leave,” she said.

  I shook my head in the negative. Leaving would only make it appear as though I thought myself better than they were, and that was half of the issue to begin with. Besides, I didn’t think I could stand up, even if I wanted to.

  “Shut the hell up!” somebody screamed.

  Silence engulfed the room, extinguishing all of the hateful noise like water on a fire. Everybody looked from one person to the other. Then, finally, all eyes landed on the man who had just told everybody to shut the hell up.

  It was Father Bingham.

  “Listen to yourselves. Listen!” he said, rising. “You’re like a hungry Roman crowd at a Christian buffet. Look at her!”

  He pointed at me, just as a tear ran down my face.

  “She cannot help what has been willed to her.”

  Somebody made a disgruntled noise.

  “And the basis of her inheritance hasn’t got anything to do with whether or not she is fit to run this historical society. Now, I’ll tell you all what. You just take the historical society. Go ahead,” Father Bingham said, loosening his collar. He pushed his small round spectacles up on his nose. “Where will you take it? Does anybody here have a place where you can house all the records and the computers and the antiquities … and … and … collections of this society? Do you?”

  The room was silent, save for Elmer, who nodded his head and said, “Hear, hear.”

  “We’ll just start our own historical society,” Eleanore said.

  “Eleanore, don’t be a boob,” Father Bingham said. “What do you know about history? What do you know about this county? This river? The people of New Kassel?”

  Nobody said a word.

  “Now, I am here to tell you that there probably are a few of us in this room who could do Torie’s job. But, Eleanore, you’re not one of them.”

  “Well, I never!” she said and jumped to her feet.

  “Oh, sit down and shut up,” Charity said over her shoulder to Eleanore.

  “Now, here’s what I propose,” Father Bingham began.

  “With all due respect, Father,” Elmer Kolbe said, “I’m the treasurer of this society, let me.”

  Father Bingham bowed and sat down. Elmer limped up to the front of the room. “I nominate Torie O’Shea for president of the historical society . Are there any other nominations?”

  “I nominate Helen Wickland,” Eleanore Murdoch said.

  What a stroke of brilliance. Helen’s nomination was of definite concern to me. Yes, I wanted to be president of the historical society. This is what I do best. This is who I am. And Helen, out of everybody in attendance, had the best chance of beating me. Eleanore knew this. How very shrewd. Helen was established, never ruffled any feathers, and had been a member and an officer of the historical society for years before I even came along. Plus, she was well liked and respected in the community. Her only shortcoming was that she didn’t have the historical background, and that was something, at this point in time, I didn’t think was going to matter much. This was going to be a popularity contest, and it seemed as though my popularity had sharply decreased now that I was wealthy.

  “Helen, do you accept this nomination?” Elmer asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, glancing around the room. She shrugged. “Well, I suppose.”

  “Are there any other nominations?” Elmer asked.

  “I nominate Leigh Duran,” somebody said. By this point, the words were beginning to sound like a roaring lion in my ears. I could barely distinguish one person’s voice from another. I had no idea who was speaking. I wasn’t sure, but I thought Elmer asked if there were any other nominees.

  “Runner-up will be vice president. Ladies and gentlemen, I think either way we’ll have a winning team,” Elmer said.

  “What about the historical society?” Danny Eisenbach said. “What about where it will reside?”

  “There will be no vote on that,” Elmer said.

  “But you can’t do that!”

  “Yes, I can, Danny. You people need to get something in your heads. The Gaheimer House and everything in it is privately owned. If you want to take the organization without its assets and holdings, fine. You come to me with a location for its new home, and we’ll vote on it. But all that goes is the records and the computers. Mr. Gaheimer’s things stay. Because they are Torie’s now. Until then, don’t mention it again.”

  Nobody had anything to say to that.

  “I’m nominating myself for treasurer again,” Elmer said. “Anybody else?”

  Not one person raised a hand.

  “Secretary?”

  Stephanie raised her hand. “I would like to try.”

  “She’s not a member!” Barbara Marina cried out. “It’ll be Sylvia and Wilma all over again. A monopoly.”

  Stephanie pulled her checkbook out of her purse and wrote a check and handed it to Elmer. “There’s my dues,” she said. “I’m a member. I’d like to run for secretary. I have a degree in history. I’ve been a teacher for ten years and have never been arrested. I was a Girl Scout for twelve years, was on student council, and have been an officer in several organizations. There.”

  The room was deadly silent. Tom Petersen raised his hand and stood. “I’d kinda like to be a secretary,” he said. “I’ll throw in my nomination for myself.”

  “Let’s just vote and get this over with,” I said to Elmer.

  Elmer nodded and handed out pieces of paper for everybody to use as ballots.

  “Speeches! Speeches!” somebody cried.

  I gave Elmer a disgruntled look. It was customary for the people running for an office for the first time to give a speech before the voting. In the case of running for an office that you already held, there was no need. I just wanted to vote and go home. “Well, since nobody’s running against me,” Elmer said, “I have nothing to say. You all know who I am anyway. I mean, you all know who all of us are. Why should we do this?”

  “Because it is the custom,” Father Bingham said in a soothing voice. “Let the people have their speeches.”

  Nobody had ever made Sylvia or Wilma give speeches.

  “Fine, but I’m not doing it,” Elmer said.

  “I’ve already given my qualifications,” Stephanie said.

  “Mr. Petersen,” Elmer said, “rise and tell us your qualifications.”

  Tom Petersen did so. His qualifications included winning the Granite County Bass Open. I wasn’t sure what fishing had to do with any of this, but he was entitled to use whatever he saw fit to demonstrate his leadership qualities. Then it was Helen’s turn.

  “Well, uh, I have a degree in business from Meramec Community College. I’ve lived in this town my whole life. Born and raised here. My parents were born and raised here. My grandma was the first one to come here. Back in 1940. She brought two of her children with her, and the third one, my mother, was born here. I’ve belonged to the historical society for twenty-two years, and I’ve been instrumental in completing projects l
ike the cemetery project and so forth. I would take my job as president very seriously. And I would never abuse it,” she said.

  I was a bit taken aback by that last statement. Helen was a dear, dear friend. Was she suggesting that I would somehow abuse being president? In fact, I thought she was acting a bit odd to begin with. She had been … disturbingly quiet up to this point.

  “And oh yes, I was homecoming queen of 1974.”

  There was a slight rumble of laughter as Helen gave a fake curtsy and sat down. Leigh Duran stood and straightened her blouse and began speaking. Stephanie leaned over to me and said, “What do you think is going on here?”

  I shrugged, trying desperately not to cry. She rubbed my arm.

  “What was your position before?”

  “Secretary, tour guide. Personal assistant to the Pershings,” I whispered.

  “So this is the first time this position has opened up.”

  I nodded. “I knew there would be people who wanted to be president, Steph. But I didn’t know there were so many people who hated me.”

  Then it was my turn. I stood on shaky feet.

  “Excuse me if I seem a bit slow-witted this evening,” I said. My voice shook, and all I wanted to do was run home and cry, but I looked at Elmer and Charity and Father Bingham and a lot of faces that I knew loved me and supported me. “I really think my record stands for itself. I have served as an officer for ten years. I have been a special project coordinator for just as long. I am the one who implemented the cemetery project that Helen mentioned, along with a special exhibit on the sunken ship, The Phantom, and on the two great floods we’ve had here. I convinced Sylvia we should put all of our charts and records on the computer, something I’ve been busy doing for the past three years.”

  I stopped and looked around the room. My voice faltered and I had to swallow hard to keep going. I could not believe I had been attacked like this by these people I had known my whole life, people I had never once tried to hurt.

  “Furthermore, I know more about most of your families than you do. I know the history of every building in this town. I know the history of this town and the surrounding area before there were white people living on it. But more than anything else, I love this town. I love its people. And I never thought the day would come when I would have to defend myself where it was concerned. I might not always be the most diplomatic, and I’m going to make mistakes. The Brown Jugs, obviously. But I’m good at this job. And that’s all I have to say,” I said and started to sit down. Then I thought of something else I wanted to add and stood up. “Just one more thing. There are moments in your life. Little moments when the clouds part and things become perfectly clear. We all have them. Some more than others. I have had plenty of them in my life. But I’ll tell you the hardest lesson I’ve ever had to learn. Tonight, it is just as crystal clear to me as the winter sky. Money doesn’t change you. It changes everybody around you.”

  With that I walked out of the room. Let them vote. The hell with them. Why should I care if their heritage was preserved for them or not? I mean, Elmer was right. It wasn’t like this was the CIA. In the grand scheme of things in this world, this was so way down there on the scale of importance that I was ashamed of myself for even worrying about it.

  So I walked right out of the building, got in my car, and drove home. I had talked myself into apathy. The numbness actually felt good.

  Eighteen

  When I arrived home, I walked straight through the house and out to the back porch. I stood there for a few minutes taking cleansing breaths. My chickens clucked in the darkness. They were usually asleep by now; something must have been irritating them. The leaves rustled up above, and the undeniable smell of rain hung heavy in the air.

  The words from the meeting echoed in my head. That woman. Eleanore had called me that woman. When did I go from being Torie to that woman?

  After a few minutes Rudy came out onto the porch to interrupt my trip down memory lane. I was grateful.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, Helen is here.”

  “Here?” I asked.

  “Just knocked a second ago. Torie, what happened?”

  Shaking my head in the dark, I turned and walked inside. He wouldn’t have believed me even if I had told him. The whole world had gone insane, and somebody forgot to let me in on the changing of the guard. I walked into the living room with my arms crossed, ready to defend myself, but at the same time oddly disinterested.

  “Torie,” Helen said.

  “What?”

  “You won,” she said.

  I would have thought the news would thrill me, but, honestly, I only felt a little relieved.

  “I made VP. We’ll be working together,” she said. “Side by side. Well, when I’m not at the candy shop. I think it’ll be fun.”

  Just then the doorbell rang. I called for the person to come in. The door opened, and it was my sister, Stephanie. It was one of those awkward moments when nobody was sure what to say. “I … just came by to see if you were okay,” Stephanie said, eyeing Helen.

  “Well, it’s not every day that one lives through a mutiny,” I said.

  “Oh, Torie, you’re overreacting,” Helen said.

  “Overreacting? I was attacked tonight, Helen, and if I remember correctly, you never once spoke up in my defense,” I said.

  “Torie, that’s not true,” Helen said. “The historical society is allowed to disagree with you.”

  “Yes, they are, Helen. But they didn’t disagree with me, Helen. They didn’t disagree with one single policy or event or thing that I have done, save for hiring the damn Brown Jugs. It was not about me as a genealogist or a historian. It was personal,” I said, and the tears began to fall. I liked it better when I was numb. Unfortunately, with me, the more time I have to think about something, the angrier or the more hurt I get, until I ride the wave and it goes away completely. Unfortunately, right now, I was on top of the wave.

  By this point, Rudy had come into the living room, and my mother-in-law came stumbling out of the bathroom, with her hair in curlers and cold cream plastered on her face. I hadn’t realized until that moment that Mrs. O’Shea had no eyebrows. Even that freak of nature could not distract me from Helen and what had just transpired.

  “You cannot expect to be in your position,” Helen said, “and not have to endure a few personal digs.”

  “I agree,” I said.

  “What happened tonight was way over the top,” Stephanie said.

  “You’ve taken more abuse from the mayor and not reacted like this,” Helen said.

  “The mayor has never claimed to be my friend. He has declared himself my enemy from the get-go. You and half those people in that room are my friends, and the other half are far from what I would call my enemies. At least that’s what I thought. What happened, Helen?”

  She shrugged. “People…”

  “People what?”

  “Want what they want,” Helen said.

  “You could have stuck up for me, Helen. I’m crushed.”

  “Because I ran against you?”

  I stepped up close to her then. “It’s not the presidency, Helen. That is not the issue. The real issue here is the Gaheimer House and the historical society in general. There’s a reason Sylvia was in charge of everything, Helen. It’s because she founded it, she supplied everything for it. She worked her ass off for it! Now, I don’t care if I’m president or not. What I do care about is the gall of the people in that room thinking that they can move my—yes, that’s right—my collections to a different location. And cut the Gaheimer House out completely, which is what it’s all founded on in the first place. And totally discount all my hard work and dedication. Anyway, you can’t move the historical society, because like it or not, it all belongs to me! People were ready to just take my things and run. Did anybody even think about what that sounded like? ‘Oh, we don’t want you to have any part
of the historical society, Torie. But we still want to use all of your things.’”

  “Torie, that’s not true,” Helen said.

  “Yes it is,” Stephanie said. “I was sitting there, I heard every word. That is exactly what some of the people were suggesting.”

  “New Kassel has a historical society because Sylvia gave it one,” I said.

  “Maybe we should continue this discussion during daylight hours,” Mrs. O’Shea said from behind me. “You’ll wake the children.”

  “I tell you what, Helen. You go right on back to the meeting and you tell them that I’ve decided to withdraw my nomination. And my things. You guys just found your own little historical society. Without my help. Without my collections. Without my monetary gifts. Okay?” As soon as I said it, I knew I’d said too much. Tomorrow I would feel different, and I might have just burned a bridge. But what happened at the meeting was so bitter that it burned my heart.

  “Torie, you don’t mean that. Eleanore is just being a brat,” she said.

  “It wasn’t only Eleanore speaking in there, Helen,” I said.

  “Torie, I was not one of them. You know I wouldn’t do that to you,” she said.

  “No, you remained perfectly quiet throughout the whole thing,” I said.

  Helen backed away from me and lifted her hands in defeat. “All right,” she said. “Have it your way.”

  Once Helen was out the door I let out a very muffled scream. In other words, I screamed without opening my mouth. Stephanie came over then and gave me a hug.

  “What the hell happened tonight?” Rudy asked.

  “You heard her,” Stephanie said. “They ganged up on her and started accusing her of things. It was terrible.”

  “Well, obviously not everybody ganged up on you, or you wouldn’t have won,” Mrs. O’Shea said.

  “Nice to know I still have some friends,” I said.

  “You didn’t really mean what you said?” Rudy asked. “You’re declining to serve and all of that?”