Read Online The Gate by Dann A. Stouten - Free Book Online Page B

she’d also share her mind and her gospel along with her goulash.
    In fact, Grandma was such an easy mark that the hobos took a piece of coal and put an X on the curb in front of their house. Sometimes the rain would wash it off, and then when Grandpa would pull his big gray Hudson Terraplane in front of the house, he’d have to go downstairs into the coal bin to get a piece of charcoal so he could put that X back on the curb. “God has blessed me to be a blessing to others,” he’d say, and he meant it.
    God has blessed us to be a blessing to others.
    Grandpa Hunt, on the other hand, was an unemployed wallpaper hanger who had a taste for whiskey and White Owl cigars. He smoked White Owls for so long that he began to look like one, with black round-rim glasses, a weathered red beak of a nose, and bushy, feathered eyebrows. He bought the cigars at the corner store, three for a nickel, and he made whiskey out of potatoes in a still in the basement. Later in life, he switched to Kessler’s, but he made do with home brew during Prohibition.
    His idea of being a regular at church was attending every Christmas and Easter (unless someone called and wanted to go rabbit hunting—then all bets were off). Just about every Sunday, Grandpa’s knee would start to hurt something awful right after breakfast, and as much as he wanted to go to church, he’d send Grandma and the kids on without him. They didn’t have a car, and it was too far for him to walk, what with his bad knee and all. The way he saw it, if God really wanted him in church, he’dhave made sure they had a car. Besides, the sermon was the same every Sunday. “All that preacher wants,” Grandpa would say, “is to meddle in your business and get into your wallet.”
    Grandpa Hunt had a little chip on his shoulder about how his life turned out. He didn’t think he got a fair shake. He felt that working for the WPA for side pork and a loaf of bread was beneath him. Every day he would have to walk downtown, stand in line, and then catch a wagon to whatever work site the government had for him that day.
    Grandpa only had an eighth grade education, but he was a skilled craftsman who could work with wood, metal, and plaster. He also grew up around horses and had a way with them, but most days he’d end up working on a crew that was building roads out of paving bricks for the rich people. Every day Grandpa would tell the foreman that he was a skilled tradesman and that laying paving bricks was a waste of his talent and the government’s money, but the foreman wouldn’t listen.
    Eventually Grandpa stopped talking with the foreman, and every time he’d get a mind to, he’d take a little nip of potato whiskey from the flask in his pocket and keep laying those pavers. The depression was hard on Grandpa, and he in turn made it hard on everyone else—everyone, that is, but me.
    For some reason he liked me. He’d come by school and tell the teacher that I had a dentist or doctor appointment and then take me fishing. I’d row while he’d talk about people like Johnny Bosma and Jack Rietsma and how they’d get into it with the west-siders, and then they’d all go have a beer. You see, the Polish section of town was on the west side of the river that divided the city, and in those days there was bad blood between the Dutch Protestants and the Polish Catholics. Prejudice ran deep on both sides, and sometimes it was fueled by the clergy. Neither group wanted one of their flock to marry “one of them,” and it was the subject of many a sermon.
    Both congregations were made up of poor, uneducatedimmigrants who competed for the entry-level jobs in the local furniture factories, and jobs were scarce. To hear Grandpa tell it, the west-siders were a little lower in the pecking order than he was. So naturally, whenever one of them got a job ahead of him, he felt like they were taking food