The Luck of the Buttons (10 page)

Tugs thought about what she would say when she got to Mary Louise’s. She didn’t have any real excuse for arriving uninvited, except to show off her new hair. She imagined them giggling over their matching haircuts. She could take a picture of all of them. Except that she left her Brownie at home. Maybe the Marys would let Tugs be an honorary Mary. And Aggie, too. The Five Marys. She would suggest it. Mary Louise, Mary Helen, Mary Alice, and . . . Tugs. Mary Tugs?

And with that thought, her avalanche of dissatisfaction welled. Mary Tugs sounded terrible. She said it out loud. Mary Tugs. Ridiculous. Aggie, Louise, Helen, and Alice, now, those were girl names.

If she could change her name it would be . . . it would be . . . well, something lovely. Penelope? No. Catherine? No. Priscilla. Mary Priscilla. Perfect.

Tugs’s actual name was a mistake to begin with. Her mother had been out at the Goodhue cemetery, which was a beautiful place, especially the part where the soldiers were buried. Their plots had little gold stars on gold sticks stuck in the ground next to the stones. The grass grew high there, and wildflowers bloomed whenever and wherever they wanted. There were wide shady trees and breezes on top of the hill.

It was one of Tugs’s favorite places to roam, so it wasn’t hard to imagine her own mother wandering there some hot summer day, trying to catch a breeze on her bare neck.

The way her mother told it, she was strolling the cemetery the week Tugs was born, when an early heat spell swept across the plains. She was so round and unwieldy she couldn’t make it to the top of the hill, much as she craved that breeze. So she’d plopped her big self down to rest her back against a cool stone. After she’d sat there awhile, the cool of that stone had sunk into her back and she felt refreshed and hopeful that this baby would be her first living baby. Two had died before Tugs, but that was just the way of it. So Mother Button had turned around to read that headstone and give a little thank-you to the soldier who had cooled her off and given her hope. The stone had grown mossy since the boy’s death in 1864.

She read the name out loud.
Tugs Button,
she read. Well! A Button! What were the chances of that? Far as she knew, none of her husband’s family had fought in the Civil War. Granddaddy Ike’s drummer-boy days were a wee exaggerated, as the conflict ended before his drumming fingers had even gotten blistered. Far as she knew, there were no heroes among the Buttons.

She rose to her feet and lumbered back along the road as fast as she could, the baby kicking in her stomach to beat the band, and the heat not bothering her at all. She couldn’t wait to tell Father Button.

He was incredulous. “Maybe he’s from another branch of Buttons,” he said. “Doesn’t sound like our people.”

“I know,” said Mother Button. “But I saw it with my own eyes, and that is going to be the name of our baby.” After all the babies they’d christened and buried, after all the tears he’d seen his wife shed, he was not going to say a word about what they’d name this one, though he hoped this baby would stick around awhile. But what if . . . ?

“What if it’s a girl?” he asked.

“Pshaw,” said Mother Button. “We haven’t had a girl yet, not much chance of us starting now.”

And Tugs was born that night and she was a girl. She was a wailer right away. They named her Tugs Esther, after the soldier and Mother Button’s favorite Bible woman. “It’s grown on me already,” she said of the name when people inquired about the odd moniker. “It’ll grow on everyone else, too.”

She told the story of the cool comfort of the brave soldier’s tombstone every time she told anyone her baby’s name, but no one else visiting the cemetery could ever find that stone. Granddaddy Ike had gone so far as to read back issues of the
Goodhue Gazette,
which, until its demise, he’d collected on his back porch. But he found no news of any other branch of Buttons, not even of Granddaddy Ike’s own Civil War participation.

So on Tugs’s first birthday, the little Button family had gone out to the cemetery, this time with a live baby. Mother Button wanted to show Father Button the stone and prove to him what a good upstanding name it was, even though he’d never said he didn’t believe her.

“See?” she said. “See?” She pulled Tugs close and held her tiny fingers up to trace the letters on her namesake’s stone.

“Well, I never!” she exclaimed, and drew her own and Tugs’s fingers back. She stood and looked around. “I must be remembering wrong,” she said.

Father Button stooped down to look.

“Thos. Britton,”
he read. “Thomas. You know, dear, at a glance, it kind of does look like Tugs. You see how the
h
here got rubbed away and the
s
is all swirly? And the
r
and
i
are faded out, too. It’s a mistake anyone could make.”

Mother Button let go of Tugs’s hand and looked every which way.

“Oh, Robert,” she said, struck with horror at what she’d done. The name she’d treasured this whole year, the name that had tripped off her tongue, sounding to her ears like a bird’s song for twelve whole months —
Tugs Button, Tugs Esther Button
— was a mistake. She heard at once its gray tones, the flat guttural sound everyone else must have heard every time she said her baby’s name.

“Oh, Robert,” she said again. She looked at Tugs. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said. Tugs babbled happily. Mother Button looked at Father Button. “Let’s call her Esther. She’s young. She won’t even remember.”

“Aw, honey,” said Father Button. “Let it be. Tugs is a fine name.”

But Mother Button’s mind was made up. For the next month she caught herself every time she went to call Tugs and called her Esther, though it often came out Testher. She made up singsong rhymes and chanted the name to her baby constantly. But Tugs never responded. She’d repeat the sounds of the rhymes in her baby voice, but when they asked her what her name was, she said Tugs every time.

So the name stuck.

And from then until the moment Tugs approached Mary Louise’s house, she had liked her name, even defending it to the numbskulls who taunted her about it.
I am named for a brave soldier of the Civil War,
she’d say.
We wouldn’t even be the United States of America without the original Tugs Button.
She started improvising in about first grade and asking questions of Granddaddy Ike about the Civil War and adopting whatever facts she found exciting or interesting or particularly brave into her story about the first Tugs Button.

Perhaps she could tell Mary Louise that her middle name was Priscilla. Surely someone like Mary Louise would want other girls to have names as lovely as her own.

Mary Louise lived on the other side of the Thompson twins. Tugs passed the library, tempted to go in and look up
Priscilla
in the dictionary, hoping desperately that it was a word, that it meant something, but the two sisters were out on their porch waving furiously.

“Leopold is stuck in the apple tree!” they hollered. “Help us get him down!”

Tugs hesitated. She really wanted to get to Mary Louise’s house, but no one could say no to the insistent mews of that orange mound of feline.

Leopold outsized most raccoons. His belly hung so low he collected all manner of leaves and ground scraps, which he then left on the library carpet every time someone let his shaggy self through the door. You could always tell where Leopold had been when you went into the library, as there was a trail of leaves and grass marking his path, like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs. Usually he went to the children’s area, because he got lots of attention there until somebody’s mother shooed him out. Then he went scurrying in a straight line for the door, mewing as if maimed.

How a cat that fat had gotten himself up in the apple tree Tugs couldn’t imagine. But sure enough, there he was, the tiny sisters carrying on beneath the tree.

“Whose girl are you?” demanded one.

“What happened to your head? You should put a hat over that mop!” said the other.

“She looks familiar. Is she a Lindholm, do you suppose? A Stump?”

Tugs smoothed her hair with one hand. She could never tell the Thompson twins apart. Before Tugs could answer their questions, the second one admonished the first. “I don’t see how it matters whose girl she is. She has long arms. She’s tall. She looks like she could climb a tree.”

Tugs had fallen out of her share of trees, but Leopold was on the lowest limb. Still, tiny as the two sisters were, they couldn’t reach him.

“We’ve called and called,” the one said indignantly. “I don’t know why he doesn’t come down.”

“He hasn’t eaten all day,” said the other. “He’s never climbed this tree before.”

“He’s never climbed any tree before.”

“He never strays off this porch.”

Tugs knew different but didn’t say anything. The sisters didn’t see too sharply through their thick glasses. Tugs had seen Leopold at the library, up trees, and sauntering as far away as the Ward’s Ben Franklin. She didn’t know where the sisters thought he was during those long absences. Maybe they had a fat sofa pillow that they thought was simply Leopold sleeping.

Tugs stood underneath the apple tree and looked up at Leopold. He hissed at her.

“What are you doing to him?” one sister gasped.

“Nothing, ma’am!” Tugs exclaimed. “I’m just looking at him.”

“Well, do it quieter. Leopold is delicate. Loud noises upset him.”

Tugs laughed but then saw that the sisters were serious. They were not aware that Leopold was the king of chaos. When he sauntered into the church on hot Sunday mornings, he’d sing right along with the rest of the congregation. And whine to beat the band when the singing stopped, which is when some usher or another would be forced to escort him from the building and close the door to the hope of a breeze.

She stood there a moment longer, then reached out her arms fast and grabbed Leopold. He yowled but she held him tight, staggering under the weight of him. Tugs delivered Leopold to the front porch.

“No, no, inside,” demanded one sister, escorting Tugs through the door held open by the other sister.

“Here,” she said, patting the middle cushion on the sofa. “He likes this spot best.”

As soon as Tugs loosed her grip, Leopold bolted for the bathroom, where he could be heard lapping water from the commode.

“Oh, dear,” tittered the two sisters together.

“The poor thing must have been
so
thirsty. I hope you flushed, Elmira.”

“Eldora!” gasped Elmira. “Not in front of the C-H-I-L-D.”

“I’m sure she can spell, dear.”

As they continued bickering, Tugs took in the room around her. She’d never thought to wonder what was inside the two sisters’ house. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this. On every surface were photographs in tiny ornate frames. On every wall between every window there were larger frames, all photographs. There were portraits and landscapes and pictures of Leopold. There were pictures of the sisters when they were young.

There were cameras lined up on shelves, models Tugs had never seen before. She wished she’d brought her Brownie.

She reached out her hand to touch one of the cameras.

“Don’t touch!” screeched Eldora.

Tugs snapped her arm back to her side and took a step back.

“I’m sorry!” she said.

“Now you’ve gone and scared the child,” said Elmira. “And she just rescued our Leopold.” Elmira took down the camera and handed it to Tugs.

“Isn’t it a beauty?” she said. “That one was my very first. Eldora got one, too — we always got everything at the same time — but she dropped hers and it broke. So we had to share this one.”

“I dropped mine, too,” said Tugs, turning the camera over in her hand. “But it doesn’t look like this one. I won it at the Independence Day raffle.”

“So you have yourself a Brownie,” said Elmira. “We have fourteen Brownies between us, Eldora and me. We love the Brownies. When they came out in colors this year, we each bought a blue one. Here, we keep them in the kitchen. Come see.”

Tugs forgot about the Marys then. She forgot about her clunky name, her bobbed hair, even G.O. and Harvey Moore. Eldora and Elmira were thrilled to have an interested audience. They guided Tugs through their camera collection and their photographs like docents at a museum. And for Tugs it
was
like going to a museum. Only better because she got to touch things.

“We used to be famous,” said Eldora.

“In a Goodhue kind of way,” said Elmira.

“Yes, when there was a newspaper in Goodhue, we took the photographs.”

“Really?” said Tugs.

Eldora went to the pantry and pulled a tall album out from between the jars of beans and tomatoes. She opened it on the table.

“See for yourself.” She pointed to a clipping of a somber-looking man who looked familiar to Tugs.

“This is Mr. Jackson,” said Elmira. “We had our cameras with us, as usual, and we were sitting in a booth down at Al and Irene’s across from Mr. Jackson, who bought us a nip now and again, didn’t he used to do that, Sissy?”

“Sure, he did,” said Eldora. “Mr. Everett came running through the door to report the death of President McKinley, and Mr. Jackson’s face went like this here.” She tapped her finger on Mr. Jackson’s countenance. “And I just held up my Kodak and . . . click.”