The Three Sisters: An Atlantic "First"

THE last time that I was out in Indiana I had a job in a flower plant nursery which was owned by a woman. She had her hair done up in a bun on the back other head, and every once in a while she would bark. Yes, that’s right. “Yargh! Yawruh! Yagh!” she would go, squatting across the edge of one of the long wooden frames of potted plants below her, among which her hands were tremendously busy. I would look at her across the frames of potential blooms and think that what I ought to do was quit this job. When she would bark it would give me an unsure feeling.

Her husband had founded the flower plant nursery and had built it up into a very good business, but he was dead now. She was a widow, and had been a widow five years. She was a real driver. After I was there for a while I began to think of her as a person doing something intensely that she couldn’t have stopped doing if she had wanted to. Her partner in the business spent most of his lime in the greenhouse, which was underneath an oak tree toward the rear of the property. He was her brother. He had stomach ulcers.

When I started to work for her it was early in April and we were selling pansy plants. We seemed to have thousands of them, each individually potted and standing pot lip to pot lip out in the frames. The glass had already been taken off most of them. I worked with a rake, a shovel, and a wheelbarrow; and I also waited on customers. In doing this part, you would take the customer along the frames and he would pick out what he wanted. The selected plants, you popped out of their pots with the roots and soil intact, by turning them upside down and tapping the edge of the pot onto the wooden edge of the frame. You learned the knack for this. The pot wouldn’t break. The depotted plants were stood in cardboard cartons, a dozen to a carton, and the emptied pots were stood back in the frames to be collected afterward by wheelbarrow and stored for re-use in weathered brick-red pyramids in the field. There we had a trash pile for shards and other rubbish, and a loam pile which we kept covered with a tarpaulin. We also had more loam in a shed at the other end of the yard, beyond her house.

It was a real laboring job all right, not what working around a greenhouse might sound like to you. Later on that spring I worked a lot in connection with the transplanting of petunia seedlings that had been grown to the right size in flats in the greenhouse. These were transplanted into the individual little pots which we had saved from the pansies, and then were put out under glass in the frames that the pansy customers had emptied. You didn’t take them out of the greenhouse a few at a time, either; you took them out by the wheelbarrow load. In addition, you had to keep the potters supplied with dirt from the loam shed. And this you brought to them by the wheelbarrow load. And you had shoveled the dirt into the wheelbarrow yourself first.

Every night the glass-covered frames would have to be protected from the cold with canvas, old carpets, and so forth, and then uncovered in the morning. Later in the morning you had to go over the whole nursery, propping up the glass on the side away from the wind so that the plants wouldn’t steam themselves to death in there or be damaged by the wind. Then, if the wind changed, you had to go over the whole nursery, letting the glass down on the windward side and propping it up on the leeward side. At night you had to let the glass in the whole nursery down and cover it all over with canvas and old carpets again. I wondered if it was much more work on one ol those old sailing ships whenever the wind shifted or they wanted to change their course.

She kept a ten-hour day, too, and a seven-day week; but I refused to work Sundays. I took Sundays off Except for the girls who came in and potted, I was the only one who did this. She didn’t like it, and neither did her brother, for it put more work on him; but since it was in Indiana they couldn’t say anything. I thought of this as a good example of utilizing the customs of the country for the purposes of your own survival. And that is what they’re for.

ONE reason I needed the day off every week was that at this time 1 happened to be separated from my family, friends, and familiar places, and I wasn’t going to be able to start gathering the threads of these things together into one cloth again until June, and I wanted a chance to find out my thoughts about this and work them over.

One of the places where I used to stop and puzzle about my life was in front of the display windows of a store in the central part of town. What kept dragging me back there was the name of the store. It was called The Three Sisters.

Where I had come from The Three Sisters was a commercial fishing vessel with a 100-horsepower diesel engine in front of the fish hold, a winch engine, gallows, and a towing post on deck, a shipto-shore radio, a good compass, bunks, an oilstove for cooking and warmth, a freshwater tank, and an ordinary radio for entertainment. When I first knew her she was being fished out of Provincetown, Massachusetts, for sea scallops on the Stellwagen Bank by a very good man. Later she was owned in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, by two veterans of World War II and fished for quahogs in the mudhole off Great Island. What finally became of her I don’t know. I did hear later that there was a small boat called The Three Sisters working for the Atlantic Ports Cartage Company in New York Harbor.

What knotted my brow was that here in Indiana The Three Sisters was not a beautiful fishing vessel at all, but merely a store where they sold pink and blue baby clothes, little girls’ dresses, brassieres, panties, blouses, pedal pushers, swimsuits, handbags, housecoats, half-slips, costume jewelry, and the like. The name drove a harpoon into me because of the comedown, for it seemed like an enormous comedown to me. Also, there was the distance from the sea, which placed a vast plain, Ohio’s short, rolling hills, the Allegheny Mountain divide, and all the seacoast’s outwash contour in between. But I tried honestly not to hold all this against the people of Indiana, for I had been in Indiana before.

I was on my way back from Seattle then, and our freight stopped in the middle of a town halfway through Indiana. We stood there blocking the street crossings. I hadn’t eaten since the previous day, and when I learned from the nearby crossing watchman that we would be there for another fifteen minutes at least, I got down off the tops and under the boom and ran along the street past the stores, restaurants, and barbershops, up the hill to where people lived. There I ran down a side street for two or three houses, in through a gate, up onto a porch, and rang the bell.

A girl in turned-up dungarees answered the door. She was a high school kid, I guess. I said, “Sis, I’m riding the freight trains from Seattle to New York, and we’re stopped for a few minutes for the railroad crossing down here. Could you fix me a couple of sandwiches that I could take right back with me onto the train.”

“Sure.” she said, and turned away into the house. She was back in a minute or so, handing me a paper sack out the door. I look it and ran all the way back to the train. No sooner was I there than they called in the flagman and highballed. I looked in the sack and took out one of the sandwiches she’d fixed for me, and, by Jupiter, beneath them was a slab of homemade apple pie.

“I thought that you said you were broke,” one of the other fellows complained to me.

“All I did was run up the street, and the first person I asked —I told him. And it was true.

So I always had a soft spot in my heart for Indiana.

But this time I was working in a flower plant nursery for a woman who barked—

— where my only day off in a sixty-hour week was Sunday and I wasn’t supposed to have even that.

Any Sunday I wanted to I could take a bus out of town to where I could go down and sit with trees at my back and watch the White River. After a while some fellows would come down too. They would go underneath the abutments of the highway bridge and practice shooting at tin cans with a pistol from an armpit-holster draw.

One Sunday I met a fellow about my age poking all up and down a section of riverbank that had just been washed out by heavy rains to the northward. He had a canvas shoulder bag, pencils, a notebook, and eyeglasses which he kept from sliding down his perspiring face with five rubber bands looped loosely end to end around the back of his head. They held his glasses in place without exerting the least bit of pressure.

He said that he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. We were only 700 feet above sea level here, he said, approximately 117 fathoms, as a matter of fact — not much if you considered how deep the ocean was. The distance to the gulf would be the distance to salt water, he said, since that is where your salt water most likely came from. The whole of Indiana, he said, had at one time or another been underneath the sea. There had been plenty of salt water here at different times, though not for the last two hundred million years or so. During the last million, however, this area had been covered by ice at least twice, thicker than any iceberg, one time all the way down to the Ohio. All of this had been proved scientifically, he said. At home he had fossils four hundred million years old right now, from when Indiana was part of the sea floor. But the very gravel in this riverbank we were sitting on had been left by the continental ice cap, he told me. For the ten thousand years since the gravel was left, there were the traces of the people who originally lived in the general area up until (in the last analysis) November 7, 1811, when an Episcopalian of English descent named William Henry Harrison destroyed with force of arms Tecumseh’s plans for an American Indian nation. That was seventy-five miles northeast of where we were, he said, at the fork of Tippecanoe Creek and the Wabash River. Another Episcopalian of English descent was President of the United States that day. “I am an Episcopalian of English descent myself,” he said. “But we never will be right until we invite them to return.” He was a likable person. He was certainly fond of Indiana.

One day while I was out there they had a story in the paper about a lady who had descended from the original settlers. She had set fire to a bag of her garbage in the lobby of the leading hotel. She told the judge, who gave her thirty days, “So long as I’m getting back out in time to exercise my ballot.” Then, during the election campaign somebody accused this judge of having a police record. He replied, “That was during the Depression, when it was a case of steal or make whiskey. I made whiskey. I gave them value for their money, and I paid my debt to society.”

They had more churches to the city block out there than you could visit. I heard one of their preachers preach a sermon about Julie Harris one morning. She was rehearsing to play Joan of Arc in The Lark. Her director was Joseph Anthony. At first she got discouraged. “Who am I to be playing this girl?” she said. “I never believed in anything enough to die for it.”

“You can do it, Julie,” he told her. She went on with the role. Well, it changed her. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be the same person she was before she played that part.

“We form our characters through the parts we play,” the preacher told us. “You don’t have to drift. Select your role. Become the person you desire to become.”

I told him afterward that I liked his sermon very much.

“We hope you’ll be with us every Sunday,” said he.

HIGH school basketball was very big out there in Indiana. Every high school in the state put a team in the state tournament. When the teams were eliminated, people would cry. What they had was intertribal rites, not basketball games; splendid with color, light, and adolescent excitement resounding in some big gymnasium which had been built with money from earlier basketball seasons. First the rival bands would play against each other, then the special cheering sections would have their own kind of battle, and so would the rival groups of marching cheerleaders and majorettes clad in ornamented uniforms of primary hues; song against song, scream against scream. Then the junior teams would have it out. Finally there would be the game.

The burlesque house and the YMCA were on opposite corners from each other. The night I saw the famous Rose La Rose do her satire on the big-city mistress, some guy in the front row passed a remark during a dance by one of the preceding performers, who stopped and told him, across the footlights, “I get paid to come out here and make a fool of myself. What’s your excuse?” The meals in the YMCA were fairly priced and cleanly cooked and served, and they had a lobby where you could be quiet and think about things.

But I had no car, and everything was cars out there. You needed a car in order to live; it was an absolute necessity. The scene might be laid way out in the country somewhere, but twice a day, in the mornings before work and in the evenings after quitting time, the roads with nothing but trees and fields all around would teem with cars being driven in the four directions by people who traveled fifteen, twenty, forty miles to work and back each day. After half an hour of their zoop, sip, sop, all would be bucolic again.

Naturally, they had gotten fanatic about automobiles out there in the crossroads of America. They had stock-car races just as in Texas they have rodeos and in New England turkey shoots. Almost any neighborhood you went into had some backyard where somebody was building a racing car. They had a five-hundred-mile auto race out there every spring. I remember hearing the five-hundred-mile one a great distance off going ”Rahr, roar, yaraghr” for several hours one afternoon during which one of the drivers was killed while I worked over the interminable frames of potted petunias, for by now it was nearly June and we had an ocean of these plants. We had several varieties of them, some for a dime, some quite expensive and looking like excessively burgeoned orchids. Crowds of people came to buy them; some counting in their purses before saying that would be all, others better off. One was a genuine millionaire.

THE millionaire came several times to buy, and he bought mostly petunias. He would be driven to the flower plant nursery by a uniformed chauffeur in a black limousine half a block long. Whoever waited on him always got tipped a dollar, and I finally got to wait on him one day.

We were very busy that day. The customeis were all over the yard, and everybody in the nursery had more than he could do. My millionaire took his time and kept on picking out and buying. His chauffeur seemed to have disappeared, and he and I had to do all that work by ourselves, lifting the pots up out of the frames, depotting the plants, and packing them into the cartons. He bought nearly fifty dollars worth from me. In the middle of all this my boss hurried by, along the main path, and started to scold me about some pots she saw in the aisle.

“I’ve told you, Irish,” she called, “about leaving pots in the aisle. Now, don’t leave them in the aisle, will you please?”

Some time before this I had bought a solid-green flannel shirt in a store near The Three Sisters, and they had started calling me “Irish “ on account of it, although I am not Irish. It was one of the most favorite flannel shirts that I ever had, but it s in a hooked rug somewhere now.

“He didn’t leave them in the aisle,” my millionaire told her.

“Well, I don’t know how they got there, then,” she answered him.

“We don’t know anything about them,” he replied.

“They certainly don’t belong there.”

“They were already there when we came down here,” my millionaire insisted. “He didn’t have anything to do with them.

“Well, he can just put them back in the bed,” she said. “He knows they’re not supposed to be in the aisle,” and she went off.

“She’s a pistol, isn’t she?” my millionaire said.

“She did look like the gem of the ocean or something,” I admitted, “standing there, and giving us Hail Columbia.”

“If that chauffeur of mine hadn t disappeared just when we had so much work to do, we wouldn ‘t have been as rushed as all this and got caught with our pots out, so to speak, and gotten bawled out this way,” he said. “It’s too bad that they didn’t snip her thread five years ago instead of her husband’s.”

“You knew her husband.

“Oh, yes. He was a great guy. A fine fellow. He was very widely liked. A lot of people keep coming here just because of him. That’s why I come here, mostly. Hut they don t like to snip the wife’s thread first, the three sisters don’t. Do they?”

“The three sisters?”

“Yes,” he said. “The Fates, you know. You never heard of them?”

“I suppose that I did.” I had, of course; I remembered now; but I had learned veiy little about them, and I had forgotten that little entirely, it seemed.

“In ancient Greek mythology, he told me. “One spins the thread, the other measures it, and the third snips it; and there you are in the next minute, shaking hands with the undertake. The Graces. The Priestesses of the Moon. They keep paying out your thread until your time comes, and then, blam. First off, they embroider onto your baby clothes what your fortune in life is to be. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos; the spinner, the measurer, and she who cannot be turned away, that’s who the three sisters are: the ones with the death apples that look so good you just have to bite into them. Ah, well, I guess that’s almost going to do,” he said, completing one last dozen of the small petunia plants. All of the last dozen were a deep purple. “I’m going to want two bushels of dirt.”

He had cleaned us out of all the deep-put pie petunias that we had. They had a velvety petal. They were the only really good-looking petunias. I carried part of the final batch of petunia plants, and he the rest, to the wheelbarrow on which I had loaded the other plants he had bought that I had been unable to get into the first wheelbarrow load.

“The Three Sisters.” My mind wasn’t on the wheelbarrow or the petunias. It was on what I was beginning to see as a diminishing difference between shucking sea scallops out in the Atlantic and knocking flower plants out of their clay pots back here in Indiana. And I felt better, all of a sudden, in my solid-green flannel shirt, a great deal better than I had felt in a long time, and I tilted the first wheelbarrow load out through the front gate of the flower plant nursery with a touch of my old style. A caterpillar was undulating up the inside of the gatepost as my wheelbarrow passed, and I managed to brush his hairs for him with my load without hindering him in the least, I felt myself to be in complete control, and he kept right on climbing. But I wished that I could get some help shoveling the two bushel baskets full of dirt and getting them out here and into my millionaire’s car. The latter was parked directly at the gate. It was a beautifully polished black, with a comfortably upholstered passenger compartment and a big rear trunk. It had big fenders and a long engine hood. It had big black tires with whitewalls. There was no chauffeur anywhere to be seen.

“That chauffeur of mine disappears every time I come down here,” my millionaire told me. “He must have a lady friend in the neighborhood, I do believe. I tell him, ‘Now, this time you come in and help me,’and he says, ‘All right.’ But I ought to know better by this time. Once the plants are safely loaded, he shows up again. I work for him, not him for me.”

I had finished opening and spreading the pages of a newspaper over the bottom, back, and sides of the car trunk to protect it from the soil and had started unloading the wheelbarrow loads of plants onto the sidewalk.

“You had better go get the dirt,” he said. “It has to go in first, before the plants. He won’t show up this time either, 1 fear.”

On my way to get the dirt I told my boss that my customer had ordered two bushels. 1 wanted her to get someone to help me with them. But she knew about the one dollar tip as well as I did.

“Then get them for him,” she said.

I went to the loam shed and shoveled the two bushels and got them out to the limousine on the wheelbarrow. No sooner had the millionaire and I gotten them and the two wheelbarrow loads of plants neatly packed into the car trunk than the chauffeur showed up.

“Well. Fine,” the millionaire told him. “I’m not going to have to wait to leave for home. How is your woman friend?”

“What woman friend is that, Mr. Wallins?”

“Your woman friend whom you duck out to see every time we come down to this place.”

“My woman friend is just fine.”

“What is her name, may I ask?”

“Dinah.”

The chauffeur pronounced it more like “Dinrah.” He used an extra syllable in his pronunciation of the name. Darina?

“Does she blow a good horn?”

“When Damkina blows her good horn, Mr. Wallins,” the chauffeur said, “this whole great world is going to sink straight down, and this will be the bottom of the sea.”

That is exactly what the chauffeur said. “This will be the bottom of the sea.” I stood with my mouth open, staring at him. He stood looking pleasantly at Mr. Wallins.

“He is really something, isn’t he?” Mr. Wallins said to me. Then he went on, to the chauffeur, “While we await that promised, happy time, my boy: now that my friend here, and I, have the petunias and the other plants and the two bushels of dirt all loaded, would you mind closing down the lid of the trunk and getting them all home before they wilt and die? I want to get them all planted this evening and first thing in the morning, before the sun can shine hot again.” And he took a dollar out of his wallet and handed it to me. “Here you are, and thank you,” he said.

“Let me get the whisk broom out first before I close the lid and clean up after you,” the chauffeur told him.

The millionaire got himself into the passenger compartment and settled himself for the ride. I stayed in back and held the newspaper edges out of the way of the whisk broom. That chauffeur took fine care of that big limousine. He took a soft cloth out of a pocket of his uniform jacket and dusted off the trunk lid with it and then tucked the cloth back into his jacket pocket again.

“My skin is the wrong color for anyone ever to catch me lifting a finger in that yard,” I distinctly heard him say. He had spoken as though thinking out loud without knowing or caring whether anyone heard and understood him. Then he went around to the driver’s side, got in, and drove off with the millionaire and the petunias.

How intently they all lived out there in Indiana. The day I left my job in the flower plant nursery, instead of just saying “So long” I shook hands with her brother and wished him luck on his forthcoming operation. But her — hard as she had worked me, I went up to her and kissed her on the cheek good-bye.

“Good-bye!” I said to her. “Good-bye!”

But she just looked past me to the oak tree and gave no answer.