Go Ask Alice…when she's 94

Mattie was ten years old the summer of 1921 when her cousin Siri moved to town and got a job at the post office. All day Siri stood behind a narrow window on one side of a high-ceilinged room with a wooden floor, and Mr. Peaks, the druggist, stood at his own counter on the pharmacy side. Farmers, merchants, and housewives drifted in and out for pills, powders, syrups, letters, packages, and stamps. Mattie, a child in love with books and the moon, soon fell in love with Siri too.

Siri stayed in a second-floor room at a boarding house at the end of Main Street. Her window overlooked the railroad tracks and was partly shaded by a spindly cottonwood. She was nineteen, and this move from the family farm into town was meant to be a new beginning. Instead it was the last summer of her life.

The circumstances around her death were secret and shameful. To counteract them, the editor of the local paper wrote a flowery obituary for his four hundred readers that made it sound as if she simply floated off one day into heaven. I found out what happened to her because Mattie, when she reached her eighties, told me what she knew.

Sometimes the young Mattie needed to escape constant companionship, so she left her five sisters behind and wandered around town alone. She never wore shoes, and dressed in hand-me-downs from LaRue.

LaRue (top) and Mattie

Like Alice and LaRue and all her other sisters, she wore underwear fashioned out of cotton flour sacks. Her family was poor and everybody knew it, but she felt right at home in that town. Nobody had much money. She treasured every book that came her way, turning its pages into a map of a world that she took comfort in knowing existed somewhere, if not here. But here was perfectly fine with her.

More and more often, she found herself walking down First Avenue (seven and a half blocks long, the length of the town) so she could pass the post office in order to get a glimpse of the new young postmistress with shining dark hair and flawless skin, dressed in a ruffled, high-collared white blouse and long skirt–her own cousin, a farmer’s daughter, holding such a responsible job.

Previously, she’d only seen her cousin on the farm in work clothes, and then only rarely. But now Siri greeted people, talked to strangers, and interacted with the community like an adult. Her only sign of discomfort was the way she lowered her eyes sometimes when anyone spoke to her for more than a minute. Mattie recognized this as shyness like her own, and it made her admire her cousin all the more for coming back to work day after day. (Years later when Mattie became a librarian, she would try to imitate Siri’s modest combination of helpfulness, efficiency, and politeness.)

Siri (18) when she still lived on the farm

It became Mattie’s chief ambition to get Siri to smile at her when she spied her behind the post office window.

Siri probably guessed that the daughter of her Aunt Martha and her favorite uncle, Louie, had a crush on her because Mattie always slowed her pace when she walked by, and she walked by several times a day.

So Siri would oblige—a wave, a smile—never more, but that was enough. It left plenty to Mattie’s imagination. To her, Siri was like Jane Eyre, a smart and determined girl who’d set off into the world to find her own way.

However, no Mr. Rochester in sight. Mr. Peaks wouldn’t do. He was too short and he spoke in a constricted and whistling way, as if blowing his words through a straw. But never mind. She wasn’t in any hurry for a Mr. Rochester to come along and sweep away her pretty cousin.

As the summer wore on, during slow times Siri would sometimes lean her elbows on the wooden ledge where letters were stamped and change counted, and she would gaze out through her narrow window, her face set and serious. At those times she wouldn’t see her little cousin walk by or linger near the doorway. She wouldn’t see anything. Her wide blue eyes stared out, but nothing slipped past them and got in. Mattie knew all about daydreams. This was something else they had in common.

Still other times she wasn’t in the post office at all. Mr. Peaks would dispense the mail, explaining to people that Siri’s father came to get her to help out on the farm.

Later, after Siri was dead, the townspeople thought long and hard about anyone who had ever come near her when she was not standing behind the safety of her post office window. They thought about the banker’s handsome son, Bruno Payne, who occasionally stayed at the post office to chat after getting the bank mail for his father, and they thought about a young widower and veteran of WWI who moved away to Bismarck shortly after Siri died, and about Dr. Arneson, who frequented the drugstore often and whose wife seemed old enough to be his mother and behaved in peculiar ways, such as riding in the back seat of their Model T while he drove her around town. They even wondered about Mr. Peaks, as well as others.

People in that small town loved a mystery. Focusing on the mystery helped them avoid thinking about the one who had lived briefly among them and was now gone. They looked high and low for a guilty party, but couldn’t see that they were all guilty of keeping certain forces in play that made the death of a healthy and hopeful young woman inevitable.

Continued…