Tales From The Loon Town Cafe Read online

  I nodded to Cynthia to come on in and join the story. She walked in, a big smile on her face, as though she were eager to join up with this crazy bunch of town folk. Claire paid no attention and continued with her tale.

  “So I’m in the gym storage room, rummaging around until I find my bird costume, and what happens, but the door slams shut on me. And it’s locked! I’m locked in the school gymnasium. It’s early summer and school just got out. I figure I’m done for. So I put on my Claire de Loon costume, because if I’m going to meet my maker, I want it to be on my best terms. And I stand in that hot little room thinking of all the years I have spent in Thread, good years they’ve been. Lots of fine people have come through here. I liked them all. They’ve all been very good to me. Treated me like a lady. I had no complaints. So in my costume, I laid my head down on the basketball uniforms and said my prayers.”

  “And that’s when I opened the door,” squealed Cynthia.

  “She squealed just like that,” said Claire.

  “What do you think? It’s a storage room, and I thought someone had left a corpse there. Wrapped it up in Nanoonkoo to rot away. What would we have done next year for our cheerleading routines if we didn’t have Nanoonkoo.”

  “Won a game?” snipped Bromley.

  “Mr. Bromley! My dad wouldn’t like it if he heard you talk like that? You know he thinks you should be more positive about this town and everyone in it. We will win a game. Maybe next year. The boys can’t help it. They’re just outnumbered and outsized. They’ve got the heart.” By now, Cynthia was completely inside the circle and sizing up the look of my cafe.

  “This is really neat,” she said. “I like it a lot more than when Daddy owned the place.” Yes, Red was the former owner of this building, just as he owned so much of the town. As I recall, he had also been my parent’s landlord when I was growing up. “Daddy kept this tavern so dreary, don’t you think? These are nice flowers. Did you grow them out back?”

  “Oh dear,” Claire said, “I think I hear the band tuning up. It must be time to get in place for the parade. I’m the grand marshal this year.”

  “You most certainly are not,” replied Bromley. “You know perfectly well that I lead the parade this year, as I have for the past thirty years. It’s the responsibility of the mayor. You’re not even supposed to be in the parade. In fact, you’re not even supposed to use that costume. The school superintendent forbid you to ever wear it again after last year’s event.”

  “If you’re the grand marshal, you better follow me or you’re going to be late.” Claire trundled out on her webbed feet. Bromley waddled after.

  “Some say they’re brother and sister,” Mr. Packer observed. “But who knows for sure. Not many left in town who remember those lumbering days. Twins is what they say. They certainly have turned out different, if that’s the case. I think I’ll just follow along and see that they get to the schoolyard in time. Last year, they got into quite a squabble and missed the parade.” He left the cafe, a slight odor of unwashed clothes lingering behind.

  “Aren’t they just wonderful,” Cynthia swooned. “I could spend all day with them.”

  It’s a peculiar thing that I ended up back in Thread after plotting my escape for all my high school years. During my adult time in Manhattan, Thread was a place in my past, an interesting set of anecdotes and stories. It held no future for me. The locals were too isolated, too strange. I was meant for better places.

  But last winter in Times Square, a mugger’s knock on my head forced me to rethink my convictions. All I could think of was how much safer and quieter life would be if I went home. The big city held too many problems for me. The old hometown offered something simpler. True, Mom and Dad had already moved away. Neither my brother nor my sister lived within a hundred miles of the town. And I hadn’t kept up with any of my old classmates. Yet as I rose back to consciousness from that mugging and horrible day, I could smell the Friday night fish fries of my youth in Thread. A nostalgia welled up for the sense of belonging I once had, and I knew I needed those old feelings back.

  I never saw a bar in any New York establishment as beautiful as the one I recalled in the old Thread Tavern. I never had as much fun writing for the fancy East Coast magazines as I did during those summer waiting jobs in local restaurants working my way through college. Cooking old favorite recipes for my famed dinner parties was one of the few bright spots in my Manhattan life.

  I mused on setting up a beer with a brandy chaser for the old men in Thread, of dogs waiting outside an ice cream parlor for their young masters to attack their sundaes, of women lingering over lunch to finish a cup of coffee and a homemade piece of apple pie with a flaky crust that could only come from a good lard pastry. I was bringing Norman Rockwell back to life, and it was beguiling.

  Thread is an odd kind of town. Its last big transformation had been the arrival of electricity in the days of Roosevelt’s REA act, or maybe the closing of the last lumber mill just before World War II. Or, if one were really honest, it was probably the dismissal in 1969 of Wanda, the local phone operator, when direct dialing reached the citizens of Thread. Until that year, Wanda kept tabs on the comings and goings of every man, woman and child as they made and received their calls. Red Trueheart had always paid close attention to Wanda. He trafficked in information – along with his groceries, the tavern, a hearty portfolio of mortgages and women’s hearts.

  The summer of 1969 also ushered in the final run of the Great Lakes Rail Road Northern Highlands Express. The Express was an old steam-engine, three-car passenger train that worked its way north from Chicago and Milwaukee. Each evening at nine, it would squeal to a stop at the Thread station and a handful of summer people disembarked. The summer resorts’ drivers stood patiently by station wagons with wooden sides, ready to whisk the arrivals to their week on the lake. Saturday evenings were the busiest times for newcomers, always keeping pace with the Saturday 10 am departure of the previous week’s leisure crowd.

  By the time Amtrak evolved into the national service provider, it was clear the vacation tour to northern Wisconsin was no winning route for Federal policy makers. To most Theadites, it hadn’t seemed that that many summer people rode on the Highlands Express. Everyone thought that those who did would start to drive instead. But they didn’t – even though the car trip would have been hours shorter. Most folks felt it was just too far to drive after working all week. And there were so many other more enticing, livelier towns that had to be driven through before arriving in Thread. Who could blame them if the tired workers of Chicago and Milwaukee stopped short of their original destination? And so Thread became a little lonelier

  But the lakes still glistened with clear, clean water. The towering pines still cast shadows over the lapping shores, and the loons still called in the evening light. That was the town to which I would escape back in time.

  When I returned to Thread in 1986, little had changed in the 14 years since I had graduated and left. The same stores encircled the town square. The same World War I cannon sat in the middle of an unkempt square.

  Founded in 1887 by James Thread, a renegade son of a Vermont dry goods family, Thread followed the layout of its founder’s childhood New England villages. He placed the town’s center around a square that nearly ran edge to edge of the isthmus separating Big Sapphire and Little Sapphire lakes. This town square connected two broadening triangles of developed land between the lakes, laid out in a series of neat streets in geometric trapezoids, leaving space for parks on the north side fronting Big Sapphire Lake and on the south side fronting Little Sapphire Lake. The old pike road that wandered up from central Wisconsin moseyed along South, turned into the south side of the town square and then marched steadily north through the woods toward Timberton, the next town up the road.

  The Great Lakes Rail Road tracks, the rationale for the town, skirted the other side of the town square. It didn’t leave much room for growth from the town square, but then it never mattered much. It took t
hirty years from the town’s founding just to build up the stores and offices surrounding the square. And in the fifty years that followed, it was a struggle to keep those storefronts filled.

  The lumber barons barreled through and stripped the hillsides of their virgin timber, leaving only junk wood in the many marshes and swamps. The copper and iron titans emptied the hills of the Penokee and Gogebic ranges of their ore to ship it on giant freighters across the Great Lakes to foundries in Michigan, Ohio and New York. Workers came and went, as one natural resource boom followed another.

  A few foolhardy farmers found their way to the far north of Wisconsin, mostly new immigrants from Finland, who didn’t have enough relatives with good sense to warn them away from the weak soil. They struggled at being dairy farmers, but over time they fled to other endeavors, and their barns eventually caved in after one too many winters of heavy snow.

  The hardwood forests all felled for their lumber and then cleared of stumps for short-lived farm fields were slowly abandoned. Eventually, the fields grew over with sumac and then poplar. Finally oak and maple returned. The jack pine in the swamps spread up shallow banks to hillier areas, and a mixed forest emerged, holding little memory of the lumber camps or failed farms.

  Through the decades of transforming landscapes, the double Sapphire lakes remained the same: large, edged with broad sandy beaches, and fed by fast-moving trout streams. The lower lake flowed in the upper one, which in turn emptied into the Coeur de Lattigeaux River that flowed north to tumble into Lake Superior. And always, the loons continued to sound through the evening wind.

  In the distance, the cacophony of the Thread Screaming Loons marching band could be heard. Cynthia Trueheart was still standing in my cafe. She took a wide-eyed lingering look to completely capture the interior space as if trying to decide something.

  “Why don’t you have curtains?” she concluded. “Don’t you think it would be more inviting with chintz?”

  “No,” I replied. “I want people, especially tourists, to walk by and be drawn in. They need to see people sitting around their tables, enjoying good food and good talk. The Loon Town Cafe should pull people in.”

  “Aren’t you afraid they’ll just get scared away? You know, I really like Claire, Bromley and Mr. Packer, but they’re a bit weird. Even a New Yorker like you would have to admit that,” Cynthia said. She paused, and I pondered how a decade away had somehow made me a New Yorker.

  “Don’t you just love that music? It’s so alive. Loon Fest makes this town jump. So many tourists show up. If only all these old folks who once summered here could come back. Daddy told me how they used to have great cabins on the west side of Big Sapphire. And they’d throw fantastic parties, bringing in bands from Milwaukee and Chicago. Their guests would come up on the train for the weekend. The wives and the children stayed all summer. The fathers would come up for a week or two and the weekends. They even had servants.” Cynthia sighed. “Those old enormous camps are almost all gone. Burnt down, torn down. It depends.

  “But when I was little, some of the old folks still shopped in Grandpa’s store. Grandpa would let me sit by the counter as he rung up their goods. I’d sit there all day long. They’d come in, buy a few things, and say ‘Big John, put it on our account.’ And Grandpa would. Daddy won’t do that anymore, but Grandpa would. He knew all those people. And they all knew him. They loved him. I know they did. They’d talk about the way Thread used to be. That’s when I’d hear about the old parties.

  “I like hearing about the way things used to be, because they used to be better, don’t you think?” She twirled to the door. “The front of the parade is almost here. Aren’t you going to come and stand with me? You’ll miss the whole thing standing in the gloom. Come out in the sun with me.”

  I followed Cynthia out to the radiating heat waves of the sidewalk. The day was going to be a scorcher, with extremely clear blue skies and just a few billowing cumulus clouds on the southern horizon. The sky suggested a change on its way.

  Almost the entire square had people fronting the sidewalk. Close to a thousand people were probably in town. In places, people even doubled or tripled up.

  In the center of the square, a huge temporary dance stage was set up. Tonight, Jerzy Jerzynski and his Jelly Jesters would be playing their mixture of polka and top 40 rock hits. Colorful red, white and blue bunting saved from last year’s festivities decked the sides, masking the rough two-by-four planking that held the level dance floor a good foot above the uneven ground. Some enterprising gardener from the Ladies Guild had cut bundles of red and white gladiola and set them in large buckets wrapped in aluminum foil.

  The stores around the square made a token effort to join the holiday spirit. The more thrifty ones followed the town square’s approach and simply pre-used Fourth of July garb. Others, like Red’s grocery store, took the high road with a loon motif. Black and white birds wrapped in pine greens decked out many a store.

  Most of the crowd was in front of Red Trueheart’s Piggly Wiggly supermarket. With its parking lot, it took up the entire west side of the Thread Square. The supermarket was the newest building in town. Red took a leap of faith back in 1968 and over his father’s objections tore down the old buildings housing the original Big John’s Market. In its place was a less-than-marvelous example of ‘60s architecture with big plate glass windows making up a long transparent wall. True, the parking lot faced part of the square, and the glass and cement block building didn’t quite match the timber and brick of the rest of the square. But the townspeople liked the place’s fluorescent brightness.

  The south side of the square was also well graced with spectators waiting for the parade. South Square had some of the town’s more important businesses, like the hardware store, the drug store, and the hotel (where both Claire and Bromley lived, separately of course.)

  On North Square, my side, there were fewer people. Since this side of the square had the businesses catering to the tourists, including the ever-popular Little Papoose gift shop, this seemed a bad sign. The Loon Town Cafe was at the west end of this street, close to the glamour of Red’s supermarket and the occasional traffic of Highway 17.

  On the east side were the fewest people. The only attractions were the defunct railroad station, the bank which had already closed for the day, and the movie theater, long since boarded up, the tattered posters from a 1971 showing of Cabaret peeling away.

  “I see Claire,” shouted a local. “Claire. Claire. Claire.” The chant went up. And there was the town’s favorite loon, her webbed feet high-stomping to the pallid march beat of the twenty-person Thread Screaming Loons marching band. Claire grabbed the baton from the drum major and took over the lead. “Claire. Claire. Claire.”

  Behind the band came the town fire engine, followed by the only police car in town, looking a bit forlorn in its black and white markings as it was missing a red bubble on top. Then there was the Cub Scout troop and the Brownie troop, walking in perfect disorder. Some of the out-of-towners in front of the Little Papoose were exchanging glances. They had been expecting a parade.

  The highlight of the parade pulled around the corner. It was Red’s annual float extravaganza, a wagon pulled by a John Deere tractor, driven by Rueben Cord, the pony-tailed butcher at Red’s supermarket. Covered with a year’s supply of tissue and crepe paper, the float was graced by four of the high school cheerleaders, in tighter garb than normal.

  I turned to Cynthia. “Aren’t you a cheerleader? Shouldn’t you be up there?”

  “Daddy won’t let me. He thinks it’s undignified.”

  “But it’s his float.”

  Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’m going back into my cafe,” I said. “I need to officially open, and maybe I’ll get some business.” Walking back into the place, I ceremoniously turn the sign over. “Closed” became “Open.”

  The high school band from Timberton was now in the square, playing with a precision and volume that had always escaped the T
hread Screaming Loons high school marching band. Timberton was the only high school that could always be coerced into supporting the Thread festivities. Bromley had some pull with the mayor there, who knew the school superintendent, who in turn could overrule the band director. As for other schools, not only did they seldom venture to participate in the Loon Fest, but they rarely invited the Screaming Loons to march in their summer jamborees. Bromley, Red and other town leaders took some offense at that, but Big John, the town patriarch, always maintained that the only losers were those who didn’t ask, and that Thread could get along very well without their leave.

  I was wiping down my wooden bar counter for the ninth time that morning, my feet bouncing along to the Sousa march. The parade was nearly over. Maybe a lunch crowd would soon develop. If the tourists weren’t interested, perhaps the locals would be curious.

  An older man entered the bar and slid to a seat at the far end of the bar, as hidden as one could be in a cafe with a front wall of plate glass. “What an ass-hole of a town. How I get stuck here every fucking year is beyond me! Can I get a Heineken?”

  “Sorry, only got Wisconsin beers.”

  “Shit. This town’s just shit.” He paused in his tirade and looked around the place. “What is this place? Reminds me of fucking Manhattan. Who the fuck are you anyway? I don’t recall seeing you here last summer.”

  “I wasn’t here last summer. Just opened the place. Today’s the official opening, at least for the bar. And while I can’t give you an imported beer, how about a nice glass of a California Chardonnay. Something crisp, not too mellow.”

  “Sure, how about a glass of Kendall-Jackson. Got that?”

  “Want a bottle? I don’t serve that by the glass.”

  “Yeah, why not. A bottle. Since you have some decent stuff, I might as well drink it. I definitely do not feel like going back to the compound and dealing with my wife and her mother. By the way, the name is Henry Van Elkind.”