A Good High Place

Chapter 41

c H A P T e R F o R T Y - o N e We never found out where he got the dynamite. He had plenty of access to it around the lumber camps. We knew that. He wasn’t so crazy that he didn’t know the times were changing and there would be no place in it for him soon. i think about all of us. curiously, i think about Mabel a lot. Mabel and me. How she’d been excluded right along while i had not been so much included as made an accomplice. it wasn’t my age, i don’t think; it was my willingness to sacrifice that made me the one. Through the years Mabel and i never discussed those early years in elk Rapids, but we built a tortured kind of friendship. For a while, we both lived in oxford, Michigan. later, i moved to Birmingham, which was still close enough for frequent visits. But the spaces remained; Mabel made it clear she had no curiosity about what she might have suspected, and i’ve learned enough about spaces to know that they stay there as long as a person wants them to. But this is what i do remember about Mabel the person: she was married for a brief time to a man named Taylor who died early of a stroke or heart attack. She didn’t have children, which came as a relief to her, probably, because she got enough of them teaching all those years in oxford. did Mabel do justice to the slugs and misfits that i never could have? i hope so. 216 L.E. Kimball i remember she had a particular yen for peanut clusters and peppermint. That she was on the basketball team and won awards betweentheyears1910and1914.ThatshehadbusyhandslikeMama and a dignified face like cap’s. That she hardly ever laughed, but if she did, tears ran down her face. i remember her face jumped. She had developed permanent ticks in it, an eye jumping one minute, a cheek the next. The jerks seemed to encompass her whole face and made it pretty hard to relax around her. She was taller than i was, thinner, too, with a straight back. She was not stylish and wore shoes appropriate for a woman on her feet all day. She liked stage door canteen music, maybe because she once dated a soldier right after she left elk Rapids. And she was always good with a needle. She made me beautiful dresses, ones i’m sure she didn’t approve of but which were appropriate in the twenties and thirties for recitations i did in speakeasies and university libraries. When i married duke in 1928, in a small ceremony in front of the fireplace at his parents’ home in lake orion, she made me a small pillbox hat with a short veil, in a champagne color to match the dress, with exquisitely embroidered detailing and delicate lace. She stayed with me a few days when dick was born. Though she wasn’t much of a cook, she was an immaculate housekeeper, like Mama. She died two years ago at her home in clarkston. i found her in the bathtub having a good soak, eyes closed, her face calm and utterly relaxed for the first time in her life. She taught me to play bridge. i cooked for her often. it was me that got her to laugh. Anyway, cap announced to us both, Mabel and me, right after the dynamite incident, that he intended to do carpentry downstate, close to where Mabel lived at the time. Mabel and i had no idea how lucid he was and whether he’d be able to pursue an endeavor like carpentry or whether we’d have to support him. But it turned out cap took great pride in his work, did rough framing for quick money. He soon became known as a fine finish A GOOD HIGH PLACE 217 carpenter, and in later years he made furniture—chairs and tables primarily—out of cherry or pine, sometimes beech. He made beds with backboards intricately carved in mahogany or oak, though he always said oak lacked subtlety. He liked to do the caning on the seats of chairs, and people came to him to do that right up until he died. cap lived with me awhile in Birmingham. He was not comfortable...