The Wicked Witch of the North

I continue now with Juanita--the title is cute but wrong--irreverent for someone in the Other World and for a person who loved me dearly—certainly more than she loved either my mother, Dollie, or even her husband, Gene. And Dad was King of the Hill, the man who could do no wrong—the brother she never had, perhaps the husband she could never have gotten who married Dollie, that "fool cousin" of Juanita's who hadn't even learned to decorate a Christmas tree.  For Juanita, every holiday was a Pageant.  For Mom, holidays became nightmares.  The excess of Juanita's celebrations simply destroyed Dollie's holiday exuberance.  


We must remember, however, this is a story of reconciliation, as a work in progress Here and continued and perhaps Now complete in the Other World. Maybe it took 15 minutes; Other World with its own Time and Space.

That's my Faith.

Like Lear, almost too late with tears and guilt, “we must attend to these things now.” For Now, Juanita was more Regan and Goneril than Cordelia.

When Gene realized how good ET was at the new business, he backed into those “shadows of the wood.” This line from W.B. Yeats’ “Who Goes with Fergus,” works better:  “Who will drive with Fergus/Gene now?” Where did Fergus/Gene go?

Gene bought some land here and there, bought an airplane he didn’t need [and which ET certainly did not need], built a house and dug an artificial lake [I’ll bet Los Angeles didn’t like that].

My occasional meetings with my uncle were with my Dad, at his side, bored but apparently recording everything they said. And it was not always pleasant.

My father’s chronic albeit harmless deviations into fly fishing and even skating Gene’s frozen pond began here. They had found paradise together, tucked up against the Sierra Nevadas. The playground waiting, Gene began putting the toys in place. We already know about Homo Ludens: Here are the roots of Playing Man’s problem. He loved Gene more than any of his other brothers. All the siblings called him “son,” so a “son” he became.

Even as a second grader, it seemed strange to me that two or three times a week, Dad and I would drive out to Gene and Juanita’s. Dad entered Terra Incognita when we left the house. It pains me [and Dad, later] that he would blithely overlook Trouble at Home. For me, the Little Boy on the Hill, it was candy and an occasional pair of socks, the soft, yes soft, murmuring voice of the Witch-become-Fairy Godmother. Juanita loved me more than my brother, Gene.

My first encounter with injustice came when Gene and I stayed with Juanita for a couple of days. I didn’t have the words, so I probably said, “it ain’t fair” when she held Gene out a day in the lake because he had a cold.  “Tomorrow,” she barked. “Larry, go ahead.” Gene watched. Tomorrow came and she said “no again.” I self-consciously paddled around like a small water spaniel. No fair. Perhaps Gene had the wrong name.

Jaunita’s generosity continued throughout her life. When we moved to Escondido, they moved to Oxnard, close enough but far enough for Mom’s comfort—somewhat. On a warm July afternoon, Juanita, who had been listening to me play my trumpet, said, “ET, doesn’t he own his own horn?” He nodded “no.” Away the three of us went—bliss for Juanita, alone with her two “boys” an away from “foolish cousin.”

In Reese’s Music Store we looked at the horns. With trembling hands, I picked up a used Conn trumpet. Eighty dollars. "I pay fifty, ET, and you pay the rest." We celebrated at the Junior Drive-In, sitting there in the shade, eating burgers, listening to Rosemary Clooney inviting us privately to “Come onna My House... come on, I will give you everything...” Juanita's black Spanish eyes pierced me; the intimidating right eyebrow rose. Spanish pepper boiling. “Should Larry be listening to something like this?” she asked. Dad smiled, lost for words, his mind on the Seventh Hole at Circle R golf course, “Oh, I don’t know, Juanita.” He didn’t and didn’t care. "He’s always known and read more than you realize, ET," she said, taking a lady-like bite out of the immense Big Special.

Other memories float through my head. I’m fighting what Don Hunter in his poem by the same name calls “The Wolves.” My asthma and Austin make bad medicine. I am anxious to “finish” this unpleasant business.

Moral? What do you do with people who love you but hate the people you love? Do you choose one of those “two paths” Robert Frost leads us to? I took both paths but always looked over the bushes and through the trees for my mother, who was on these occasions alone. Note: no fair—again. You can’t take “both.” The carnival guy barks the answer: “You gotta choose, sonny.”

When Dad turned down an offer to “run” the Thompson Propane business, sold to Petrolane, we moved to Escondido, to Thompsonville. Dad couldn’t see Gene every night after dinner, but he grew restless almost immediately. And I think he missed Gene; he wanted Bishop back in his life, but another “Bishop.” And he knew Gene was reading, constantly reading magazines and books of all kinds, dressed in a yellow bathing suit, lying on his back on the floor [a Thompson thing], reading, smoking—and drinking.

Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan explores probability and improbability. The title is built on the notion that because no one had ever seen a black swan, we assumed all swans were white. Then black swans came along in Australia. A “Black Swan Event,” then, is that once-in-a-lifetime moment. Of those who make 25,000 dollars a year, 25% goes to the lottery—their last great hope of the one and only black swan moment in their lives. What did Fergus/Gene seek? And ET behind him, the closet inventor, repairman on call, pliers in hand, the Man with a Dream? The Black Swan.

It was clear that Gene was disintegrating—but still dreaming. That dream took us to Santa Paula, California [10 miles from Oxnard: surprise!] and a moribund cement company, a Mormon bishop sold to them.  Fergus/Gene in his occasionally strange innocence at times, “trusted” the man. Dad winced and Dollie made “damn” sure that Thompsonville was on “loan” to Milt and Ethyl only. Earlier in Bishop it was Gene, a non-believer, who loaned the LDS church the money to buy a lot for their first chapel. Later, of course, they repaid. Gene of the Good Heart. Tell me, please, how many Good Hearts are hidden?

The business collapsed in six months and we returned to Thompsonville. Gene went back to his yellow trunks and Argosy magazine [full of stories of high adventure, of course] and  John Barley Corn, the “bottle.” Is the story of this sometimes unhappy quartet over? Nearly.

Amazingly, when Dad got his wish and sold Thompsonville, he and a partner, Terry, met with Gene—again. Suddenly ET was no longer Playing Man. He was behind the wheel of a large tractor, being “lowered”—backed down into a canyon like The Real Grand Canyon, dad seemed to say. Where was Fergus/Gene, the heavy equipment man? Maybe, as Yeats says, he was “brood[ing] upon love’s bitter mystery.” One child, Mark, died of pneumonia. A second child, a daughter joined them in Oxnard—unexpected, “tricked” was Gene’s whisper to Dollie. “She trapped me just when I was packing.”

In the depths of the “canyon,” depressed in every way, ET has an epiphany. “Where is Fergus? Where has he ever been? Meanwhile Gene is tinkering with a Buick transmission, nursing a Bud Light, not in the canyon. “The hell with this,” Dad says and off the family goes to Napa, California, and another possible “black swan.”

I admit I didn’t get at Juanita. I can’t find what Wordsworth, the poet, called “the willing suspension of disbelief.” I don’t even  want to talk about a Witch. Fergus, I have come to understand a little and to love.

Sometimes people have to die before we know who they were.

So Fergus fades into sweet memory.  Months ago Gene [my brother], Fergus’ namesake [perhaps, that was never settled between ET and Dollie] and I walk, approaching the Rexburg Temple.


We see Uncle Gene in our minds, playing checkers for the first time. Smoking, calm, his beautiful  black hair combed straight back, his face strained.  He had read late into the night, a book my brother loans him, sardonically, on physics. “Interesting,” he says the next day over coffee. 


The marathon Super Bowl checkers matches begin. We stick and move, as a famous boxer once said. We win 40 games in a row. But he never blinks, never seems angry. We whoop and yell in our best Kiowa imitations. But he toughens. The next 40 go more slowly, as the sun sets. Stoked with Twinkies and whole milk, we keep going, finding ourselves crumbling. Coffee and patience carry Fergus to steady victories.

I am sure all of the Thompson family is now with Fergus in the Other World. The “shadows” are receding, and though he may be “disheveled among the stars,” I think everything will be fine for Fergus.  

And the Wicked Witch of the North?  I believe she’s becoming a Fairy Godmother—a Spanish Senora, the brows relaxed, the razor voice now soft and sweet, her hand in Dollie’s.

I think they are decorating a Christmas Tree.