MAY 8, 2024 – (Cont.) On warm weather afternoons Bill would stroll down the driveway to retrieve the mail. Hanging from a crosspiece was a wooden square bearing the family name below a silhouetted hunter, gun raised toward silhouetted ducks flying across the top of square. If Bill wasn’t an avid worker, he was an avid hunter. Some years ago while chatting with a lawyer on the opposite side of matter, I learned that he and his father, who’d lived in Minneapolis somewhere used to go on regular hunting trips with the Caine men of Rice Street. The lawyer had gotten to know the Caines well and vouched for them as good, interesting company. I wasn’t at all surprised.
As far as I could tell, Bill never had a traditional job. One of my sisters reported that he owned an apartment building along the Rum River and that Bill’s job, as it were, was to manage the asset. In marked contrast to the Caines’ home quarters, the apartment building was always tidy.
Both Jeff and Jonam were into sports, but as they aged, Jonam accumulated unhealthful weight, while Jeff, apparently lifted weight. Though full-fledged games were played on their vacant lot, Jeff and Jonam played catch—baseball and football—on the dirt driveway. During the summer, I noticed, these sessions usually started at around two in the afternoon and involved about 10,000 throws/passes each way between the two brothers.
Just as predictably as the catch sessions were the self-directed, behind-the-wheel driver’s ed classes. At around 4:00, Jeff and Jonam would get the keys to the family Woodie Wagon and spend a good hour taking turns behind the wheel, backing the vehicle from the house to the street, then driving it back to the house—about the length of a football field each way. I was impressed by how fast and straight they could drive backwards and how perfectly smoothly they drove forward.
Jeff and Jonam were a couple of years older than my sisters, and when the latter two were still in grade school, the Caine brothers, visibly active as they were, fascinated Nina and Elsa. I remember eavesdropping once on their whispered stories about Jeff and Jonam. One night upon hearing soft but animated chatter from the room my sisters shared, I slip out of my bed, tip-toed to their open doorway and listened intently. The details were so vivid and abundant, I was convinced that the stories were all fact, no fiction. Apparently the four of them had gotten locked in for the night at school—the Caines in one classroom, my sisters in another on another wing of the building. The story was about the girls’ finding their way around in the dark, hearing scary noises, discovering Jeff and Jonam were playing baseball in a pitch-black hallway, and so on and so forth, from one mini-adventure to another until daylight. I was fascinated by how much I was learning about Jeff and Jonam that I hadn’t already observed directly—in reality.
The years passed and my sisters and I traveled, then settled far from Rice Street—and all the other streets of Anoka. The Caine kids stuck close to home. Jonam, in fact, stayed at home, which was nearly his undoing. Late one night a catastrophic fire swept through the single-level home. To escape the heavy lethal smoke, Jonam attempted to escape through his bedroom window. By that stage of his life, however, his girth was wider than the width of the window. He proceeded to get stuck and nearly died, but fortunately the Anoka Fire Department was called and arrived in time to rescue him. Someone told my parents that having learned his lesson, Jonam subsequently went on a crash diet.
Jeff left home but barely. He and his wife built a handsome house on the vacant lot, which put their driveway directly across from my parents’. Twenty years ago, while Jeff continued his work as a registered land surveyor (a challenging status to achieve), the couple took over the business Molly had started—Antiques on Main in downtown Anoka. I would call upon them to handle the estate sale of my parents’ lifetime accumulations. Molly herself would live to be 90, despite having been a heavy smoker. Bill didn’t fair so well. He was only 65 when he moved on to the happy hunting ground. Jonam died at 76. According to his obituary, he was an avid reader, was fond of music and played in a rock ’n roll band, and “loved computers.” My interpretation: I was right about him—he was “anything but dull.”
And their younger sister, Jill? I lost all contact, but I’m sure she’s done well for herself and by her family . . . and horses. I’m guessing too that she’s still relieved that her parents didn’t name her “Candy,” as she once told me they’d considered.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
