Chapter One

A Rainbow Certain

               “Life is vale of tears,” his Gramma Louise said to Tom Harant when he was eight years old. Somehow, he thought she meant a veil of tears and regret …a misty mythic veil of regrets that each man and woman must somehow meet and defeat during their lives. It was only later, when he came to think about his years in Iron Lake, that he remembered her words.
               “Life is a valley, all right,” he once said to no one in particular.
               During the week he was in the hospital, Tom Harant remembered little of the doctor who told him to go home and chop wood. For the first three days, the drugs kept him in a vegetative state …he could remember sitting on his bed for one entire day. The last four days were equally hard to remember. There were two counseling sessions. However, the patient Tom Harant was not in for drug treatment, so the counselors seemed to take little interest. He remembered telling a doctor at the Golden Valley Center about the stress of working in a fish bowl. The doctor told him to chop wood twice a week. That was the sum total of what Tom Harant, Superintendent of the Iron Lake Schools, remembered about the week his wife put him in the hospital for stress.
               The unfortunate thing was he couldn’t forget what he really needed to forget …the seven months before, during and after the Iron Lake strike. He desperately wanted to forget the weeks in August 1990 when the School Board was debating whether to risk a strike. He would have preferred to be somewhere else when the fire occurred, or when the Board held a public meeting with 600 angry parents in attendance. He wanted to forget the illegal actions of the School Board (which he somehow was supposed to prevent). And then to get the telegram from the Department of Defense, telling him that his son Mark was injured in the Gulf War. Those seven months piled stress upon more stress until Tom Harant was almost beside himself. At least, he thought, I am a new man …32 pounds lighter than when school opened back in September.
               That was one advantage of working in a fish bowl with lots of angry neighbors, as he explained to his good friend Wrecker Kline. Tom was whistling in the woods to a choir of deaf trees. Wrecker and his wife Mary Jo were sitting in Tom’s breezeway for a late snack after a baseball game (Iron Lake 7, Tivoli High 1).
               “Don’t do it,” Wrecker said adamantly. “You’ll ruin your chances for a new contract.” Wrecker was a nickname, from his days playing college football. He was wearing his traditional black sweatshirt with ‘Notre Dame’ printed across the chest. Wrecker was a large man with large hands, and a happy-go-lucky demeanor.
               Wrecker looked at Crystal …he knew Tom’s wife would worry about the prospects of having to move again. She was sitting with her fingers clasped, her head down, looking at the kitchen table. Wrecker saw the top of her blond hair …and he saw her head jump once. She reached for the coffee cup in front of her, out of a need to do something, anything to get Wrecker to look elsewhere.
               “Explain it to him, Wreck. You know how stubborn he can be.” She said these words quietly. Crystal was lifting her cup, knowing she wouldn’t have to say anything more. She glanced sideways, trying to look at Tom without actually looking at him. Her husband was staring at Wrecker, trying to force a smile onto his face. ‘It’s such a nice face,’ she thought, ‘you don’t deserve him’.
               Crystal was proud, and at the same time possessive, about her man. He had what a neighbor described as a pleasant face, eyes of a blue that turned azure when Tom wore a blue dress shirt. His brown hair was worn short, in a fashion that he called ‘Drill Sergeant’ short. ‘Wall street conservative,’ Crystal liked to call it. Tom’s bushy eyebrows and straight nose tended to make his appearance somewhat stern but Crystal knew that inwardly, Tom was an affable teddy bear who cared about people and their kids.
               “Mr. Wrecker Kline, …I’m not trying to shovel ‘manure’ here. I think my tenure at Iron Lake is about over,” added Tom when he winked at Mary Jo. She had that ‘Oh, brother, here we go with this old argument’ on her face. Wrecker’s wife had a pleasant face, with thin eyebrows and soft cheekbones. She was everybody’s picture of compatibility and always knew what Wrecker was thinking. For the baseball game, she had worn a white blouse under a solid red blazer, the traditional red and white of Iron Lake.
               Mary Jo laughed and reached across the table to pat Crystal on the arm. Crystal’s lips separated in a wide smile but it was a smile of determined stoicism. Crystal knew that Wreck couldn’t change Tom’s mind. These two men had been arguing about this subject for months.
               “You need to put it behind you, Tom.”
               “And do what? What should I do about the sleepless nights …the pacing around the house …the sounds I hear in the quiet of the night …the screams of teachers on the line …the sirens during the fire …the threats that were made …you tell me,” he said emphasizing the words “darn it.”
               “Try to forget the strike, Tom. You’re not helping Crystal and you’re not helping yourself by remembering.”
               “Don’t you think,” Tom said, “I’ve tried to forget?”
               Tom got up from the kitchen table and walked over to the cabinet above the refrigerator. He took out a bottle of E&J Brandy, and poured himself a stiff shot. Then he buried the brandy under ice and diet cola. He brought the drink back to the table, and sat down. Crystal was looking at him, with that expression on her face.
               “On a week night?” she said. “Aren’t you going to offer some to Wreck?”
               “Yes, I guess I am,” he said getting to his feet. He knew that Mary Jo wouldn’t drink anything stronger than wine, and then she limited herself to one glass per night. Wrecker and Tom, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy drinking together …each knew that what was said in Tom’s kitchen stayed in Tom’s kitchen. Wrecker was a minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He claimed the ELCA was a great homogenous group of Lutheran churches that specialized in missions to the heathens in Africa. Tom took Wrecker with a grain of salt, and knew that confidentiality was a two-way street. Wrecker had shared some of his secrets with Tom and Crystal. Tom knew that Wrecker could be trusted, and added,
               “Percy says …write the book, tell the story and let the rest be damned.” He said this while pouring Wrecker a double shot of brandy. “But then you know Percy …damn the torpedoes …full speed ahead.”
              “That’s our Percy,” Wrecker added. Everyone around the table knew Perseus Smith as an assertive yet obstinate member of the Board of Directors, who invariably let everyone know exactly where he stood on any subject. Mary Jo laughed when she remembered the night Percy came to the spaghetti feed at the church, dressed like a French nobleman, with frilly cuffs and a lacy shirt. Percy was going to talk to an American Legion group about the right to hold an opinion.
               “Who is he angry with this month?” Crystal asked, expecting either Tom or Wrecker to know the answer.
              “The federal government. Some highly placed doctor says there is no evidence that ‘Agent Orange’ has caused lung cancer or leukemia.” Tom knew all about Percy’s anger. Percy was a Vietnam Vet, married to a ‘long-suffering’ yet patient woman. During the stretch break at Thursday’s Board meeting, Percy harangued Tom about the government’s failure to support the medical claims of Vietnam veterans.
               “So Percy says write it. He probably thinks writing it will help you to calm down?” said Wrecker, expecting an argument.
               “That’s enough …from both of you,” said Crystal as she stood up. She moved to the oven and pulled the door open. With a heavy mitten on one hand, she removed a flat pan that held eight apple turnovers. She placed the pan on a cutting board, and proceeded to open a package of white frosting. With her back to the other three, she added,
               “We don’t need to relive the strike, do we?” She nipped off a corner of the white frosting and squeezed it onto to the apple turnovers. When they were ready, she turned toward the table. Her husband was sitting …looking into the murky cola of his drink …staring at the swirling colors, trying desperately to see the future. Wrecker and Mary Jo were looking at her. She thought the scene reminded her of a Norman Rockwell painting …friends gathered around the table in her Early American kitchen.

 *****

               The kitchen was anything but Early American. It was almost the way they had found it. Maple cabinets above the sink. Maple cabinets including a pantry and a broom closet went along one wall. The former owner removed a bedroom wall and created an eating nook with a picture window that looked into their huge back yard. Tom and Crystal had purchased the owner’s maple dining set …with eight Early American chairs …they were the only things ‘Early American’ in the room.
               The kitchen was carpeted with bright blue, a shimmering blue outdoor carpet. The previous owner had found the carpet on sale at a warehouse, and bought it without asking his wife. He purchased so much of it that blue carpet covered the kitchen floor, the breezeway into the garage, and the master bedroom. While Tom was negotiating the price for the house, the owner’s wife confided to Crystal that she wouldn’t miss the ‘aqua-velvet’ carpet, as she called it. Crystal smiled and said nothing …she knew that Tom had fallen in love with the trees that shadowed and swayed above the house.
               Tom’s trees, as she came to call them, were part of a tree nursery. When the nursery went out of business, an astute businessman had saved the trees that ran down the property lines. Each lot had thirty and thirty-five foot Norway pines or twelve foot White pines running along the edge of the property. As Tom discovered later, on a quiet night sitting in the breezeway, you could hear the murmur of voices among the pines, a quiet shushing sound that Tom described as the music of the trees. He found the breezeway was the perfect place to sit while reading a Ludlum or MacLean novel late at night.
               It was Tom’s house, more than it was Crystal’s. In the first year, he painted the entire house by hand, slate gray with white trim. In the second year, he trimmed the trees higher, and manicured the lawn. In the third year Tom scraped each window, replacing old putty with new and painting the windows slowly and carefully. The previous owner had built a fountain by pouring cement into a hole. Unfortunately the fountain tilted after it was built. The water sloshed out of the pool on the low side. Tom tackled the long neglected fountain and managed to get a pump to throw water six feet straight up. He had to refill the fountain every five hours, but he enjoyed the task.
               Sitting in the breezeway, on a quiet summer night, Tom decided that everything was just about perfect. His father, who rarely said one word of praise to anyone, had complimented Tom for fixing the fountain. Frank had posed by the fountain, with Tom’s son Mark, who was home from a tour of duty aboard the USS George Philip (FFG-12), a guided missile frigate. Mark was 26 years old, during that long, lazy summer when Tom and his Step-dad took time to talk to each other. That was the summer before the Iron Lake teacher’s strike -- the same summer before a forceful dictator named Saddem Hussein invaded Kuwait.

*****

               “You want me to forget the strike. I can’t. Just as I can’t forget my father and his pain. Or the pain of some of the people here in Iron Lake.” Tom drank from his brandy …at first, a sip …then a swallow. He stood up and stepped back from the table. He looked at ‘the Ramblin’ Wreck from Bechyn Tech’ and watched while his buddy Wreck raised his glass in a salute. No words passed between them.
               Crystal came up beside Tom and placed her hand under his arm. She squeezed his arm. Tom raised his glass to Wreck and said,
               “May the sun always shine,
               Upon your window pane,” before his friend Wrecker added,
               “May a rainbow be certain
               To follow each rain.”
               The two men had a tendency to become maudlin when they drank brandy. The two women thought they understood their men. Crystal and Mary Jo were down-to-earth ladies, sworn to support their men while getting their children through high school, and with luck, college. Tom’s dedication to his school district meant that Crystal rarely raised a word of concern. What happened in Iron Lake troubled her. Moreover, she knew that Tom carried a large amount of guilt for the teacher’s strike in 1990, and for not visiting his father who was dying with bone cancer that fall.
               “The rain seems to follow me around,” Tom said quietly. “I’m not chopping enough wood,” he added and laughed. Mary Jo had a puzzled look on her face. Tom had not told a soul about the psychiatrist’s prescription. After all, who would want to know that their School Superintendent had been to see a psychiatrist during the Iron Lake strike? Such a revelation would have diminished the faith people held in Tom. He was smart enough to know that such a revelation would lead to questions about his competency.
               “I have this dream, Wreck. Can you imagine this?” Tom walked to the table and sat down. “I’m running through this field, trying to reach the trees at the border of the field. Someone is chasing me. I can’t see who it is and I don’t know why I’m running. I burst into the trees and I circle around to my right. Through the dark I see three men …they are carrying shotguns.”
               “Are you sure they are after you?” asked Mary Jo, loudly.
               “Yes,” said Tom, with determination.
              “It’s a nightmare, Tom.” His friend Wreck had a puzzled look on his face and was about to stop Tom’s comment.
              “I can’t see the faces of the three men,” Tom added.
              “It’s a dream, Tom.”
              “Yes, it is. But why am I running?”
              “Can you be leading them, instead of them chasing you?” Crystal seemed to have this momentary flash of insight. “Maybe they aren’t after you. Maybe you were leading them?
              “I feel a lot of dread …almost as if I know my end is coming.”
              “Is that all bad?” asked his friend Wrecker.
              “No …it’s not all bad. There must be an end to my work here in Iron Lake. It would feel good to get rid of the bastards and leave.”
              There was a small gasp at his shoulder. He turned to look into Crystal’s blue eyes. He could see the worry and the fear, deep in her blue eyes. “I don’t want to tell you this …but,” he continued. Both her hands circled his arm. He could feel them tightening on his arm.
              “There was a rumor,” said Wreck.
              “And you didn’t tell me?” stated Crystal with a glare at Tom.
              “Would it have made any difference?”
              “No.”
              “What did they do?” asked the Wreck, leading Tom into telling them what they knew they didn’t want to hear.
              “They voted Four to Two to ask me to resign.” Tom turned and put his left hand over Crystal’s hands. He could see tears welling up into her eyes. A drop of water squeezed out of her left eye and ran toward her chin. ‘At least our kids are out of high school,’ he thought to himself.
              “Which four?” asked Wreck.
              “Cratt, Trivic, Arnie and Glacial Linda. She always follows Cratt’s lead.”
              “Can the vote be reversed?”
              “One of the four of them would have to move to rescind the original motion. Or Percy or Fitzsimmons would have to move to rescind and hope no one remembers Robert’s Rules.”
              “Even then, it would require two of the original four to vote to rescind and rehire you,” the Wreck said, casually.
              “Not likely,” Tom said quietly. He was still looking into Crystal’s eyes. He knew she was hurt. They had put so much of themselves into this school district. Church choir, the local Cable Commission, Economic Development, and Sunday morning coffees out at the resort on Iron Lake.

*****

               Caramel rolls and coffee were the tradition at Bulrush Bay Resort, on the north shore of the lake. On Sunday mornings, a small group of traditionalists came together at ‘Bulrush’ for the rolls and the conversation. It was an opportunity, as Tom Harant believed, to meet with the ‘movers and shakers’ of Spencer County …the businessmen and leaders of the county. The men brought their wives dressed in their Sunday best and two groups formed, the men to discuss politics and the women to talk about their children.
              Bulrush Resort was a campground and boat rental on Iron Lake, just off the county highway that ran around the lake. Walking from the lot, the new visitor was always impressed by the huge bony skulls and jaws of monster Northern Pike that were nailed to the power poles by the marina. Some of the skulls, from 30-pound Northern Pike, were bigger than a child’s head. In summer the marina held the boats of the faithful who motored across the lake to Bulrush Bay. In the winter, snowmobiles would be lined up on the shore. It was here on a Sunday morning in early June that Tom Harant began to wonder about Connie Cratt.
Tom was standing outside the restaurant, looking at the marina, when Cratt walked up with two bottles of beer.
              “It’s a little early in the day, isn’t it?” Tom asked.
              “You went to church, didn’t you?”
              “Well, yes.” Tom reached out and took the bottle that Cratt offered. He lifted it to his lips and swallowed a third of the bottle. In the back of his mind, Tom knew he shouldn’t add to his waistline. Mr. Cratt, however, was a member of Tom’s board.
              “Nice morning, what?” Connie was wearing a white shirt with a plain brown tie. His suit coat was probably in his car. He reached up and scratched the back of his head and then took a swallow from his beer.
              “Too much politics, in there,” Cratt continued. “They’re all talking about the fall elections …the mid-terms they call them. Hell, ain’t nobody give a damn about the mid-year elections, ‘cept maybe his Honor the so-called County Commissioner.”
              Tom was looking at Cratt, trying to figure where the conversation was going. Connie had a ‘standard’ face if there was such a thing. Bushy eyebrows above brown eyes, over a straight nose that protected an equally bushy mustache. Connie seemed to be a little warm. He wiped sweat off his forehead. He reached up and pulled his tie down, loosening the button at the collar of his shirt.
              “Well …” Tom ventured. “You know some people …they love to discuss politics. They’re probably just frustrated men who wanted to run for office but their wives said no.”
Cratt laughed. He looked at Tom, wondering how much he could tell the local school superintendent. Then he took another swig of his beer. “I’ve decided to run…” he began, while looking at his beer bottle. Then he added, “for state president of my union.”
It was a cool morning. Tom felt a shiver along the backs of his arms, or was it a premonition of disaster? He asked Cratt if he saw a conflict of interest.
              “Hell, no. The Amalgamated Sheet and Metal Workers of America are an AFL-CIO union. We’re damn proud of who we are. But we do no business with the state, and certainly we do no business with the Iron Lake Schools.”
              “Will you stay on the school board?” Tom was afraid that Cratt would want to continue on the board, raising questions about Cratt’s loyalties, just when the School Board was entering negotiations. It was June of 1990 …six months before the Iron Lake strike.
              “Hell …I don’t suppose you could get a strong Republican to take my place, laughed Connie. “Most of the men in Iron Lake are wimps…”
              Inwardly, Tom cringed. He had never heard anyone refer to his neighbors as ‘wimps’ and he looked around to see if anyone was in hearing distance. A small breeze blew a few dead leaves across the grass and into the lake. Two of the boats at the dock knocked into each other. To the south beyond the lake, dark clouds were forming.
              “And that applies to your so-called teacher’s union. They don’t know what a union is. They are just a group of over-paid pansies …flaming commies as far as I can tell …I’ll whip them into shape this fall.”
              He raised his bottle and finished the beer. They were standing in the shade when a dog walked quietly past. The dog meandered over to one of the power poles with the skulls of northerns. It raised its hind leg and wet the pole. As it was finishing, the dog looked up and saw the empty eyes of a northern skull staring back. It yelped, and ran off for a short way.
              Tom chuckled. Cratt looked at him, as if to ask why he was laughing. Tom didn’t reply. He stood and looked at the man, one of six who shared the power on the Iron Lake school board.
              “But you’re just one of six, Connie. You can’t run the Board.”
              “With three more votes, I will run it.”
              “Why would you want to?” Tom asked.
              “So the rest of the state can see how I can stand up to these blood sucking teachers and their liberal leaders …that Don Diamonte, in his fancy building across the street from the State Capital …Christ, Almighty. The Minnesota Education Association isn’t a real union, not like the Federation of Teachers, the MFT.”
              He handed the empty bottle to Tom, telling him to send his wife out …that they were heading for home. Afterwards, driving back into Iron Lake, Tom wanted to tell his wife about Cratt’s comments. Something kept him from speaking. He thought about the dog that was scared by a skull and shivered. He had only been on the job at Iron Lake for one year …and he wondered if Iron Lake would turn into a ‘valley of tears’. He saw leaves blowing across the street …sure sign of an early fall.

*****

              Standing in his kitchen three years later, he saw gentle tears in his wife’s eyes. He knew she was feeling bad for him, for all they had been through during and after the strike …dealing with the shadow of Connie Cratt that cast a pall across their lives and the lives of Iron Lake teachers. Now, to have the board ask for his resignation …in what amounted to a betrayal.
              Three years after the strike, Tom was not ready to quit. His friend Wrecker told him not to tell the story. If anything, Tom felt the story needed to be told. He wanted people to see Connie Cratt as he really was: a vindictive man trying to live up to his father’s reputation as a union organizer.
              “It’s your guilt, isn’t it?” she said one day when she had the courage to challenge him. He didn’t respond. He was looking out the window at a rain cloud approaching from the southwest …it was raining in that corner of Iron Lake. He knew the storm would blow over in about fifteen minutes, leaving the corn and soybean fields damp with the rain they needed. The farmers called these storms ‘million dollar rains’ for the value they added. He could sit afterward in his breezeway and look in the direction of the retreating storm. He would marvel at the blue sky that followed the rain. Some days, feeling blue, he wondered if it would ever be his turn to feel the joy of a rainbow.
              Ten years later, in Fairmont, Minnesota Tom said to himself, ‘I should tell this story. It’s the real story of Iron Lake’. The year was 2002, ten years after the strike. Tom and Crystal were in Fairmont, his third school district. His kids were grown, and ‘well launched’. That was how he described Corrine and Carl …and Mark was now a Lt. Commander in ‘Today’s Navy’.
              “It’s the story of how four people ruined themselves, of how a fire led to a death, and how people deluded themselves, thinking they could control four members of a school board who set out deliberately to bring down a union.”
              That was how Tom described the story, how it felt in his gut. Crystal knew that Tom, more than anyone else, still carried guilt about the strike, still thought there was more he should have done during that tumultuous year. She knew, when he felt blue, that he was searching for the joy of a rainbow.