Hippomobile! Page 3

  “So you can remember him?” we asked.

  “Just them sideburns,” said Grandpa Virgil. “What about you, Homer?”

  “Course I do. But let me finish my story now. You see, kids, in spite of his nice house and them nice whiskers, Gottfried still had one problem. And you know what that problem was?”

  We didn’t.

  “His problem was his feet.”

  “His feet?” we asked.

  And Grandpa Virgil asked, “His feet?”

  Grandpa Homer gave him a look and said, “That’s right, Virgil, his feet.”

  And then Grandpa Virgil said, “Of course! How could I go and forget his feet like that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Grandpa Homer. “Because, kids, when Gottfried was out in the Alaska winter diggin’ for gold, his toes turned all black and just about nearly froze clean off.”

  “Froze off?” The story was really starting to get good!

  “Well, they didn’t froze off, but they did stay black as coal, and ever after that Gottfried had a problem finding shoes that didn’t pinch his toes none. So you know what he done?”

  We didn’t, but we sure wanted to.

  “Well, what he did was he used some of that gold he had left and built hisself a brick building and started manufacturing his own shoes.”

  “Manu-whatering?” we asked. Back then that was a long and complicated word for us.

  “Shoe factory,” Grandpa Homer explained. “Gottfried Schuh’s Shoe Shop it was called. His business took off like a bottle rocket, and his piggies couldn’t have been happier.

  “Gottfried Schuh loved to tinker around in his shop. He came up with the darnedest things, and there warn’t never a contraption he didn’t like. And one day he caught wind of something called a McKay machine that made shoes all by its own. And he decided he just had to have hisself one of ’em, and four months later it arrived by train right at our very own train station.

  “Well, he tested it out, and that thing spit out shoes for him left and right, but Gottfried didn’t feel it lived up to his high standards of perfection. And so what he done is he improved upon it. And in time Gottfried got it so improved upon that he created the perfect shoe that never wore out. He called them Gottfried Schuh’s Everlasting Shoes. If you’ve ever taken a good look at them black things Grandpa Milton6 wears on his feet, then you’ll know what Gottfried Schuh’s Everlasting Shoes is. Them shoes Grandpa Milton wears is one hundred years old or more and got wore by Grandpa Milton’s grandpa and Grandpa Milton’s pa and now by Grandpa Milton hisself, and not even the shoelaces ain’t never needed replacin’.”

  “How true, Homer,” said Grandpa Virgil. “Not even a single shoelace.”7

  Grandpa Homer continued. “And soon word spread about them Everlasting Shoes. Folks took to calling them Gottfrieds, and folks came from all across the county and sometimes from clear out of state just to buy a pair. They’d stay in town right at the Any Hotel, where we all live today. Except for back then it was still called the Stanley.”8

  “How I do remember, Homer,” said Grandpa Virgil. “I was only about knee-high back then, but I remember my pa sayin’ how much hair there was in that hotel on any given day. Must’ve been good business.”

  “Must’ve been, Virgil,” said Grandpa Homer. “But now listen close, kids, because here’s what happened next. Within a month or two, there warn’t a man, woman, or child within seventy-five miles of Wymore that ain’t bought and wore a pair of Gottfrieds. And so Gottfried Schuh naturally started makin’ more and more of his famous shoes. After all, they was sellin’ like blowout patches.9 But the problem was his shoes ain’t never wore out, and so no one ever needed to buy another pair of his shoes again. They just took to tradin’ ’em with their neighbors whenever their feet growed some. And that’s how come Gottfried Schuh never sold another pair of his Gottfrieds, and at the end of six months he went clean out of business with a huge pile of Gottfrieds in his factory.”

  Not only was that the bad part of the story, but it was also the part where our grandpas decided to spin us around in the chairs to face the big mirror, put a bowl on our heads, and give us a trim.10 We usually felt sorry for ourselves when that happened, but as long as we got to find out what happened to Gottfried Schuh, we said we wouldn’t do no complaining. Our grandpas said it was a deal.

  “So there he was, kids,” Grandpa Homer began again. “Penniless once more on account of makin’ all them eternal shoes. But a man like Gottfried Schuh warn’t a man to give up so easy. He might’ve been outta work and down on his luck and without a penny in his pants, but there was something he had on his hands. And can either of you guess what that was?”

  We looked at each other in the mirror, and by the way our tongues were sticking out the sides of our mouths, we could tell each of us was trying to come up with a better guess. But none of us did, and so we just said, “Nope.”

  Grandpa Homer turned to Grandpa Virgil. “Virgil, what about you?”

  And Grandpa Virgil said, “Why, Homer, I’d say he had his hands on the McKay machine, is what I’d say.”

  “Right you are,” said Grandpa Homer. “The McKay machine. But what do you do with a McKay machine when you already got more shoes than you can ever find feet for in the whole state?”

  That was another question we didn’t know the answer to.

  “Well,” Grandpa Homer said, “if your name’s Gottfried Schuh, you roll up them sleeves of yours and tinker around with that McKay machine and make it do something else useful. And you probably wanna know just what that was.”

  We did.

  “Well, then, I’ll tell ya,” said Grandpa Homer. “But to tell ya, I’m gonna have to tell ya somethin’ else first. You see, Gottfried still kept in contact with a sister he had back in the old country. They’d send letters to each other back and forth, and that was how Gottfried kept up on the gossip in his old village. Things like who had the best apricot preserves that season and whose hen laid the most eggs.”

  “Whose?” we asked.

  “Whose?” said Grandpa Homer.

  “Yeah, whose?” asked Grandpa Virgil.

  Grandpa Homer just shook his head. “That ain’t so important right now. But what is important is that sometimes his sister would write him of other news she heard about. Things going on elsewhere in the country. And one piece of news was about a new kinda machine that you could sit on and make go from point A to point B without you having to do none of the work. Kinda like a horse. Only it was a machine. You get what I’m gettin’ at?”

  This time we said we did.

  “Good. Because when Gottfried read about that idea, he thought it sounded kinda nifty. Because remember, here’s a man walked all over Alaska, freezin’ his toes black. So if he could contrive up some sorta somethin’ that would allow him to sit on his backside while this somethin’ did all the work and brought him to where he wanted it to take him, wouldn’t that sound good to you, too?”

  We told him it would.

  “Well, there you go. Gottfried Schuh got to work on his McKay machine, and took out the motor, and added some nuts and bolts, and put on a gear here and a belt there, and plopped that whole new engine on the front of a three-wheeled horse wagon. Then he slapped a horn to the front of it for safety purposes, and you kids ain’t never gonna guess what he had hisself.”

  We could see in the mirror that both him and Grandpa Virgil were getting pretty excited, and we figured it had to be the big moment of the story. And so we just took a stab at it and said, “You mean a hippomobile?”

  Well, our guess surprised them more than a four- cornered egg. In fact, we clean knocked them speechless, something that had probably never happened to those linguisters before.

  It took them a minute to get their tongues back. And when they did, Grandpa Virgil said, “Them kids are as smart as new paint, Homer.”

  SO NOW YOU KNOW that the word “hippomobile” we saw in the letter ain’t got anything to do with the hippo you se
e in the zoo. It just means an old-fashioned car that looks more like a horse-drawn carriage. But what we still wanted to know was how come Gottfried Schuh gave it a name like “hippomobile.”

  “Good question, kids,” said Grandpa Homer.

  “Well, what’s the answer?” we asked.

  “Ain’t no one knows,” said Grandpa Homer. “Does they, Virgil?”

  “Ain’t nobody I knows who knows,” said Grandpa Virgil.

  “Theories abound, though,” said Grandpa Homer.

  “What are theories?” we asked.

  “Theories? Well, them are like guesses. Ain’t they, Virgil?”

  “I’d call ’em guesses, Homer.”

  Then they went on to tell us some of the theories. One theory was that Gottfried called it a hippomobile on account of its gigantic size because the horse carriage he picked out for it was a mighty big one. Another theory was that his English just never got no good and he thought he was calling it something else altogether. The problem with this theory is that it didn’t explain what he thought he was really calling it. Then there was the theory put forth by the librarian Grandma Henrietta. She said that in one of her dictionaries hippo means “horse” in a language called Greek. So according to her, Gottfried Schuh called it a hippomobile because it was made out of a horse wagon.

  That made a light bulb turn on in our heads, but then Grandpa Homer asked, “Why in the world would hippo mean ‘horse’ in any language?”

  That sounded like a good question to us, but we didn’t know the answer and shrugged our shoulders. We were in kindergarten, after all, and didn’t even know there was any other language outside of the one we talked.

  Even Grandpa Virgil nodded his head and said, “Point well took, Homer.”

  And Grandpa Homer said, “I’m at the conclusion that why Gottfried Schuh called it a hippomobile is just gonna remain one of them mysteries of nature.”

  Since we both liked mysteries and thought nature wasn’t too bad, neither, we asked, “So what ever happened to this mystery of nature?”

  “Why, it’s still in the old shoe factory down on Hill Street,”1 Grandpa Homer said.

  “It is?” That news floored us more than the wood planks beneath our feet.

  “Maybe we should take ’em there right now, Homer. Whaddaya think of that idea?” asked Grandpa Virgil.

  And we shouted, “Take us, take us!”

  And so it was settled.

  We’d never been all the way to Hill Street before, and so walking all the way down there, as Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil were proposing, was a right big adventure for us, and we were as excited as jumping beans. But we’d hardly even gotten off the square when Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil started in with their singing.

  Now, don’t mistake us; we enjoy a lot of them songs of theirs. Even back then, we knew several by heart and were glad to sing right along with them. But the song they picked for our hike down to Hill Street was so full of “sweethearts” and soft words and sentimental thoughts that we almost wished we hadn’t said we wanted to see the hippomobile in the first place. And here’s just two lines from that song so you know we ain’t exaggerating none:

  Let me call you “Sweetheart,” I’m in love with you.

  Let me hear you whisper that you love me too.

  And the worse thing about it was that them lines were the refrain part of the song that they came back to over and over again like a dog to its dish. But we just stuck our fingers in our ears and hiked on like troupers. Soon, though, we turned a corner, and that lifted our spirits. We looked up at the rusty street sign hanging there crooked and read HILL STREET on it and knew we couldn’t be far off now. And smack-dab there at the end of the street was an old brick building sitting there all by itself and surrounded by nothing but weeds.

  We took off running and had time to inspect it before our grandpas got there. It was all closed up tighter than a secret, and the windows were too high to look through even when we jumped. We soon found a loose brick no higher than our chins on the side of the building. We tried to pull it out, and when that didn’t work, we got a stick and shoved it in and heard the brick hit the ground on the other side. We peeked in, kinda like looking through a hole in a circus tent, but we didn’t see no trapeze and no elephants, neither. In fact, it was too dark in there to see anything at all.

  “Well, you two coming or ain’t ya?” Grandpa Homer asked. We jumped out of our skin because there he was, standing right behind us.

  We followed him around front, and there was Grandpa Virgil waiting with a giant key that looked to us more like a knucklebone. But he used it to unlock the door, and when he did, the door squeaked louder than a fiddle.

  We let our grandpas go in first because it was mighty dark and cobwebby, and there was no telling what was lurking in there. We kept awful close to the doorway, at least until our eyes adjusted so we could see better. And once they did, we still didn’t see no trapeze and elephants. But we saw something, all right. It was big and black and huge and went almost all the way up to the ceiling. It didn’t remind us of anything we’d ever seen before, and we’ll admit that we took a step closer to each other.

  But it didn’t seem to bother Grandpa Homer none. He went right up to it and took hold of a piece of it. Then he tossed it at us, and we caught it before we even had a chance to scream and jump out of the way. And it’s a good thing we didn’t scream and jump, because alls it was, was a shoe.

  “That’s one of them Gottfrieds we was telling you about,” Grandpa Homer said.

  “Them are all the shoes he never sold,” Grandpa Virgil said. “Poor feller.”

  There were hundreds of them, too. Thousands.

  Then Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil took us around the corner into the back room. The windows weren’t so dusty back there, so this time we could see right away what we were standing in front of. It looked like a giant horse carriage on three big wood wheels, and the wheels were as tall as us. Up front we saw a big horn attached to it that looked like it could blow your ears off. There was a tall steering wheel that didn’t look like it could ever do a driver any good, and it was sticking straight up in front of the bench where you drove at. All in all, it was a strange contraption, but it was also the coolest thing to play on we’d ever seen in our lives. We didn’t even mess with asking and climbed right up it faster than a squirrel up a tree.

  The horn just coughed out dust and didn’t work none, and the steering wheel was all stuck. But that just meant we had to make our own noises instead, and that had never been much of a problem for us.

  We yelled, “Watch out, grandpas!” like we were heading straight for them. But it didn’t seem like they even heard us.

  Grandpa Homer was saying, “Ain’t she somethin’?”

  Grandpa Virgil said, “A real beaut, Homer. A real beaut.”

  “The pride of Wymore back when we was kids.”

  “Don’t I know it, Homer. Don’t I know it.”

  Then Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil pulled out their hankies and blowed their noses so loud, we thought the horn was working after all.

  “Would be somethin’ to see her run again,” Grandpa Virgil said.

  “You can say that again,” said Grandpa Homer.

  But Grandpa Virgil didn’t have a chance to, because we said it first.

  No telling how long we stayed there playing on the hippomobile and how long Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil stood down there reminiscing. That’s what you call it when old people talk about the olden days and wipe their eyes and blow their noses.

  We ended up having such a good time that on our walk back into town when Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil decided to sing their song again, we even sung right along with them.

  NOW, IT AIN’T LIKE we never saw the hippomobile again after that first day. Once we grew up another notch on the wall, Mom agreed we were finally old enough to go down there and play on it by ourselves. We’d found out that playing on the hippomobile was just part of
growing up here in Wymore. Pops told us he didn’t do no different when he was our age, and even Mom had to admit that she played on it once or twice when she was just a girl in pigtails. The only problem was summer. Mom didn’t want us leaving the square when she was off working, and Grandpa Virgil wouldn’t give up that knucklebone key for nothing in the world, not even for a barbershop full of long-haired customers with long bushy beards. Like Grandpa Homer sometimes says, life ain’t always a bed of roses.

  That’s why we were as excited as a hen house about that letter we found in The Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing. Because we was counting on it saying at least a little something about the hippomobile, and anything having to do with the hippomobile always made our eyes see stars and our hearts beat quick. Plus, we were sure as eggs is eggs that a few of our grandmas and grandpas would be interested right along with us. So we jumped right off Old Tom Wood to go and tell them. Stella scraped her prayer bones1 some upon landing, but that didn’t matter. And when Jimmy landed, he said, “Ow!” but that didn’t seem to matter none at the time, neither. We just both brushed ourselves off and raised a good deal of dust on our way back over to Mabel’s.

  Now, by that time of day, you could usually find our grandpas and grandmas out and about in town. Grandma Winnie would be zooming around town in her golf cart at five miles an hour, and Grandma Pearl would be walking back and forth on the square in her safari suit, swinging her metal detector in front of her. Grandpa Chester was usually sitting on the bench outside Mabel’s with a transistor radio pressed to his ear, listening to a ball game, and Grandpa Bert swept the sidewalk in front of his haberdashery at least three times a day, so you were bound to see him. The same went for Grandma Elsie, who was always tending her daisies out front of her flower shop. But that day when we turned the corner, the town looked as empty as a cookie jar. The wind had picked up, and dust was swirling around on the street corners like little twisters. That’s all we saw, and that was too bad, because we were ready to shout out our discovery to everybody.