MY GIRLFRIEND HAS A SISTER
Well, I had just got off the bus
at Pumpkin Center and was toting my huge service duffelbag toward
Fairmount when Dennis pulled up in his shiny spit-polished red Ford. Hey
Gene, Where the Hell you been? Need a ride? I did; and after I checked
in with my mom at the house in town we'd lived in before we left for
Oregon, Dennis drove me around and caught me up on the Fairmount scene.
It turned out that he'd been seeing a pretty gal over in Hankinson. I'm
driving over to see her tomorrow and she just happens to have a sister
you might want to meet.
Well, being I was freshly free
and clear of that bundle of regulations called The US. Air Force, I was
open for anything. We pulled up in front of this white framed house
which sat kitty-corner across the street from the movie theater. Inside
we were greeted by Dennis' friend Shirley and, a little later, “Down a
lane I looked and there stood Mary/ Hair of gold and lips of cherry”--
Let me tell you friend, it was great to touch “The green green grass
of home.”
Somehow, Mary and I hit it off
beautifully. And, a short tale to make, we dated through a magical
Indian summer, warm, right up until Christmas and then, on the very best
of terms, with no mistakes to lead us to regrets, we decided to part.
Mary had an old boy friend, Jerry, who was the right religion and held
the true key to her heart, and I was about to start winter quarter at
Wahpeton State School of Science. Both of our futures lay before us
ready and waiting.
The following June around
hay-making time, another new found pal of mine, Pat Rassier made my
acquaintance. Pat was different, a genuine James Dean style rebel
without a clue. He was darkly good looking-- a lot like John Saxon,
and he had become a hunting partner of a man who was to become my best
friend, Warren Williams.
On this particular day, he pulled
up in his folks' brand new 58 Chevy and said. I'm heading over to
Pelican Lake to visit a girlfriend of mine, and guess what? She has this
really interesting sister. Want to come along? The last such invite led
to six weeks in dreamland with Mary. Why not? “Sure, Pat; count me in.
Pat's girlfriend, Jackie, was
spending the summer in her parents' beautiful year-round summer place on
the southwest shore of Pelican Lake, and when we arrived that evening,
she greeted us warmly and said, “You guys are in for a surprise; my
sister, Merza, is going to do the sleepwalking scene from Macbeth. And
in no time at all, the house lights were dimmed and the shades drawn.
Candles lit the stairway down which Lady Mac Beth would make her
entrance. Then this figure in a white, blood-streaked gown appeared: “Out!
Out damned spot! Out I say! What, will these hands ne'er be clean? All
the perfumes of Arabia can ever sweeten this little hand./ Here's the
smell of the blood still./ Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had sooo much bloood in him?”
Then she let out a blood -
curdling scream and exited sobbing, “To bed, to bed, to bed.”
Needless to say, I was more than impressed, because I had just that
spring quarter studied Mac Beth in Morgan Kjer's “Living Books” class at
Wahpeton Science.
Then Merza came out and joined
us. Let me only say, she was a truly lovely woman, with marvelous green
eyes and the wild hair of the sleep-walking scene had been done up in a
pony tail. Then we all piled into Pat's new Chevy and headed out for
Detroit Lakes. Along the way I had a chance to find out more about the
bewitching lady with me on the back seat. Her story turned out to be a
sad one. I was all ready to start falling in love with her, when she
revealed that she was leaving home for good and going to Minneapolis to
try to catch on with one of the theater groups. “I suppose you wonder
why?” she said. “You see I've been disowned by my parents. Want to guess
why? “I think I know, I said: You've found someone your folks don't
approve of. Is he black?” “You've
guessed it” So we're eloping to the cities to try and make a go of it.
My folks had other plans for me, and they are too old school to
understand. And, just like that, the dream I had of ever seeing more of
Merza, vanished away.
On the ride home that night, the
Big Bopper came on Pat's radio with the song that would ever there-after
remind me of Merza: “Chantilly lace, and a pretty face,/ Pony tail/
Hangin' down/… The following spring, The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and
Richie Valens and a plane full or future hits would crash in a blizzard
in Iowa. 'The night the music died.' “And so runs the world away.”
Gene Pinkney - - 3/29/ 21 For
the daily News - - edited html update 08-13-2021
The first old classmate I bumped
into the November I got home from the Air Force was Dennis West, who had
transferred to my sophomore class in Fairmount from Campbell High. The
West farm was just across the Bois de Sioux from ours and our connection
was that we both had farmyard chores involving milking-- he helping his
3 brothers milk 21 cows morning and night and me helping my dad by
milking one cow and slopping 72 pigs after school. We talked mostly
about how many loads of manure we had to load and spread and arm
wrestling. He could usually beat me at that because he worked way harder
than I did. I roamed and fished the river banks and he toiled and spread
load on load of brown fertilizer. I doubt he ever had time to hunt or
fish.
In retrospect, I'm glad things turned out
that way. Merza was such an enchantress, I probably would have followed
her like a lemming right over the nearest cliff. But more importantly,
God had the perfect lady in store for me, whom I would meet later that
summer. The famous words of the bard come to mind: “There is a
Divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we may.”
