Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir

by Tony Hillerman

  Another scene printed on my brain before I left beautiful Aixen-Provence came the day I was ordered to mount my crutches and report to the headquarters building. There I was put in a room with three other eye patients, waited the usual hour or so, and then was called into another room in which a large number of well-dressed, well-pressed, well-fed captains, majors, and colonels were sitting. My own doctor (a major) removed the little pink plastic patch I was then wearing over my left eye, explained to the assembly what had been done for me at the clearing station, the process of removing as much debris from the eyeballs and sockets as practical, and the treatment decision.

  He told the group that the plan was to delete the left eyeball because it was considered beyond salvation and so badly infected that it represented a threat to the right eye—which then might be salvaged. However, said this major, he had decided that this newly available penicillin had been proving so effective in killing bacteria that he would try to save both eyes. And indeed, it had worked. The assembled brass were invited to come up to take a look at how well this gamble had paid off. I was halfway back to the ward before it occurred to me how I had been used, with neither my knowledge nor consent, in a medical experiment. Two eyeballs the prize if it worked, a life of blindness the price if it didn’t. Even then, at nineteen, it seemed to me that this was betting a minor inconvenience against an almost total disability. Now, having gotten along very well for fifty-six years with useful vision in only one eye, it seems to me the major might have at least asked my opinion. But no son of August Alfred Hillerman was conditioned to bear a grudge. Papa wouldn’t tolerate it.

  Papa was just as opposed to us bearing grudges as Mama was to us being afraid of anything and I can understand why I was used as a guinea pig. While the war in Europe was almost over Army medicine faced the prospect of the invasion of the Japanese mainland. The military expected a million American casualties as the price of that. Thank God for the atomic bomb and President Truman’s decision to use it. It spared us and the Japanese from that dreadful slaughter, but my eye doctor had no way of knowing that would happen. He had to be ready to deal with more burned eyeballs.

  If I hadn’t been conditioned against grudges, what happened when the hospital ship arrived gave me ammunition for one I could have brooded over for years. The chief ward orderly trotted in after breakfast, shouted for attention, announced those of us ruled fit to travel were about to be hauled down to the docks at Marseilles. He would now read off the names of the departees. No surprises were expected. We had already heard by then that all of us were going except a poor fellow who had just come down with some sort of fever.

  The orderly read the list. My name wasn’t on it.

  As Mama had said those who expect little are seldom disappointed. I wasn’t exactly disappointed. I was crushed. Devastated. Watching the ward empty out provided the bleakest moments of my life. Even the guy with the fever went, the beneficiary I learned later of the careless clerk-typist who stuck his name in instead of mine. For about a week the only nightmare noises disrupting sleep in the ward were my own, but soon shipments of wounded came in from the final breakthrough battles. Germany surrendered, another hospital ship arrived, and I was homeward bound at last.

  Many years later it dawned on me that this fortuitous typo changed the direction of my life. The three-week delay put me exactly on a collision course with two Navajo Marines just back from the Pacific war and with the Enemy Way ceremonial their family was holding to return them to harmony with their people. That put me in contact with the people I would love to write about. As every traditional Navajo understands, all things are connected, every cause has its destined effect, the wings of a butterfly bend the wind, the fingers tapping the wrong typewriter keys change a life.

  But now I was on a list for a later ship. Now I must report to the hospital supply room and go through the process of checking out an entire new U.S. Army wardrobe from shoes to helmet, stuffing all this into a duffle bag, and getting it back down to the ward. We board a hospital bus and head for the docks. There, my crutches are taken from me, I climb aboard a stretcher, am carried up the gangplank, and deposited on a bunk in one of the ship’s hospital wards. My new duffle bag is checked into the ship’s storeroom, I am issued a cane to replace the crutches and away we go.

  Not much need be said about the voyage. The ship was small, very slow, manned by a disgruntled merchant marine crew, and its age was suggested by a brass plaque mounted in a passageway. That declared it had been recommissioned in 1917 but gave no clue of when it had been originally commissioned. One of the crewmen claimed it had done its first duty sailing up the Missouri River during the Indian Wars. He said he had signed on in 1942 when the vessel was being refitted and a sign in the dining space said:

  PASSENGERS MUST REFRAIN

  FROM SHOOTING BUFFALO

  FROM THE PORTHOLES

  The crewmen told us they had brought the ship over to serve those wounded in the North African fighting and stayed for the battles for Sicily and Italy and hadn’t been home since. That didn’t provoke any sympathy among their boatload of wounded grunts. But, alas, it seemed the last restocking of the ship’s pantry also dated back to 1942. The principal menu items were entrees based on overaged powdered eggs. We were also warned that while the Third Reich’s Army had surrendered, the German submarines hadn’t got the word and we puttered out past Gibraltar and into the Atlantic with great floodlights illuminating the red crosses painted on our sides. For the voyage home the Atlantic was as placid as it had been stormy on the outward journey—good because our crew assured us that this boat would sink without a bubble in any kind of rough weather and they all intended to jump ship as soon as we got within swimming distance of land. I can’t remember any of this worrying anyone. What the hell! We were going home. We lolled in deck chairs in the sun and watched the porpoises play.

  Home proved to be an Army hospital on Long Island, where my cane was exchanged for crutches and I was handed back my duffle bag. I lugged this to the hospital supply room and checked in all the brand-new soldier gear, and got a new set of pajamas and blue robe to replace the ones worn on the hospital ship. The stop here was brief but produced two memorable incidents. I made my very first telephone call and the Army gave another demonstration of the truth behind the axiom: “There are two ways of doing things. The right way and the Army way.”

  The telephone call happened because the Red Cross handed each of us a voucher entitling us to one free long distance call anywhere in America. It was my first call because there was only one telephone in Sacred Heart (at Papa’s store, which was also the post office) and I had never had cause to use it for the simple reason I knew no one who had a telephone.

  I still didn’t know anyone with a telephone, but I did remember the name of the operator of the rooming house where Mama was living. I called her and asked her to tell Mama I was back in the States safe and sound and would be seeing her as soon as I could get a pass. Then I was almost ready to experience the Army’s special way of getting its troops home.

  The Army first checked us all out health-wise. Then we are sent back to the supply room, issued a fresh barracks bag in which to stuff a complete new set of soldiering clothing and gear identical to the one we’d checked in when we got off the ship. That done, we were sorted by place or origin. Nothing now but wait for an available hospital train. One arrived. Residents of Texas and residents of Oklahoma were segregated. We lugged our duffle bags to the bus, were hauled down to the tracks and put aboard an engine-and-three-car train. Texans were placed in the front car and Oklahomans in the second car. The third car housed the kitchen, infirmary, pharmacy, medical personnel, and our duffle bags. Off we went, and rarely has a group made a more leisurely and luxurious journey from Long Island to the Mexican border.

  The cars were new, with their hospital bunks lined along great glass windows. Lots of space, air conditioning, and the best food we’d tasted since our draft boards put us on buses. Naturally such
trains had bottom of the list priority on a rail system jammed beyond capacity by efforts to get millions of European Theater of Operations troops across the nation and sent off to invade Japan. So we wandered across the midwest, spending hours on sidings, and more hours in city rail yards watching the important trains roar by, playing cards, getting acquainted, discussing what we’d do when we returned to the real world (young women were heavily involved in this), swapping war stories, trying to top one another’s tales of Army ineptitudes. This was not the place for accounts of either horror or heroism. These guys were almost 100 percent combat infantry. They been there. Done that. Didn’t want to hear about it. Save the baloney for the rear echelon troops, the flyboys, and the civilians.

  Long stop at Pratt, Kansas—home of my original squad leader, who had assured us that the sign on the highway declared that his town was:THE ONLY PRATT IN KANSAS See neither that nor the sergeant. An orderly comes in and tells us one car will soon be switched to go to the hospital at Chickasha, Oklahoma. The other will continue to William Beaumont General at Fort Bliss, Texas. This sounds wonderful to me, an Okie. Chickasha is not only fairly close to Oklahoma City it is the home of Oklahoma College for Women—a known hotbed of young ladies. We stop again in Oklahoma City, some switching takes place, and we roll again, now missing our car full of Texans. It shouldn’t be long now, I think, Chickasha is just an hour or so south. But, alas, it was not to be. The Army has again done it the Army way. We are heading southeast toward El Paso, Texas. The Texans are being deposited in Oklahoma and we Okies in the far and furtherist corner of the immense Lone Star State.

  William Beaumont is a nice old hospital. I got Mama on the phone that evening, told her I’d be seeing her any day—just as soon as I could get a furlough—and the word was combat disabled people were getting sixty days. I get to keep my duffle bag this time, am issued a cane, and try to walk without a limp—hoping to persuade those who make such decisions that any additional surgery needed can be delayed. The Red Cross is teaching a typing course. I take a lesson, get acquainted with the clerk in our building, and practice on her typewriter. The officer of the day summons me and hands me a stand-by ticket good for Army aircraft with room for hitchhikers and a thirty-day furlough. I tell him I’m combat wounded, should get the sixty-day version. He tells me thirty days are now the maximum. I leave full of resentment.

  On the way to the OD’s office I paused under a tree to watch a Medical Corps lieutenant deal with a problem. He had been marching a dozen or so patients down the street. He halted them, left them “at ease” on the street, and disappeared into an adjoining building for a couple of minutes. His charges then sprawled on the grass in the shade. The lieutenant emerged, ordered his group to fall in. A couple bounced up but most of them took their time. The lieutenant must have felt challenged by this and raised his voice. Wrong decision. These guys were not regular Army. They were citizen soldiers, just back from the foxholes, thoroughly sick of West Point ways. They sat back down again. The lieutenant yelled some more. They ignored him. A staff sergeant going by in a Jeep stopped, watched this minor mutiny for a moment, then got out, walked over, saluted the lieutenant, chatted awhile, then squatted in the shade with the mutineers and chatted with them. They got up, fell in, and marched off with the lieutenant. End of mutiny but a wonderful expression of good old free American citizenry.

  With that example in mind, I took my furlough papers to the ward office, borrowed the secretary’s typewriter for a moment, erased the “30,” typed in “60,” and went on my way.

  Bus ride to Okie City and great reunion with Mama and Margaret Mary, whose husband was still in Europe with his artillery unit. I learn Barney had volunteered out of his glider unit when gliders were no longer needed and volunteered into the infantry, thinking he had a deal made to join me as a replacement in my unit. It didn’t work, of course, and he landed in the Forty-fifth Division—busy preparing for the Japanese invasion. (Years later I learn that when he got word I’d been wounded, he tracked me down to the Third General, went Absent Without Leave, hitchhiked without a pass across Europe, and actually got to the hospital only to find I’d sailed away. Quite a big brother, I had.)

  It took about three days to begin wondering why I wanted the sixty-day furlough. The only two humans I knew in Oklahoma were my mother and sister—both of whom were working through the day. Mama’s landlady let me sleep on a sofa but I had no place of my own to hang my hat. The family’s old sedan still ran and I bought six gallons of gas with a couple of Mama’s hoard of gasoline ration coupons and drove down to the farm. August is not the season to see any farm—and an abandoned one looks even worse than most. I drove into Konawa and confirmed what I expected—my peers had gone to war. I had a sad, sad milk shake at the soda fountain in Bates Pharmacy. Then I left that empty, lonely town, finally facing the fact that nothing would ever be the way it had been. I drove back to Oklahoma City and started looking for a job.

  In the United States in August 1945, not finding a job would have been downright impossible. The state employment office told me to report the next morning at a small neighborhood garage not far from the state capitol. To kill time until then I called the newsroom of the Daily Oklahoman and introduced myself to Beatrice Stahl. Ms. Stahl, a feature writer, had received one of those press releases the Army sends out to regional papers when someone in their circulation zone is decorated. She had called Mama, who told her I had since been wounded, that I had also been awarded a Bronze Star in addition to the Silver one, and gave her the kind of reports mothers give about sons. Mama seems to have also recited a few paragraphs from some of my letters. Ms. Stahl borrowed them and said she’d like to talk to me when I got home.

  Thoughtful readers must have been wondering how the events in the Sessenheim Forest could have caused the Army to honor me with a Silver Star. They may also wonder how Beatrice Stahl’s article could have inspired me, who had never seen a writer, to decide to become one. Therefore I will include it here. Please note the difference between the action as described from my memory on pages 122 and 123 and the way an Army clerk imagined it back in regimental headquarters when he typed up the citation. Ms. Stahl’s use of this to convert me into a sort of Horatio at the Bridge was persuasive evidence of the power of the pen.

  So we talked. Ms. Stahl said what she’d seen in those letters suggested that I should be a writer. A writer? I’d never known one, seen one, even heard of an actual live one. How did one go about it? One went to journalism school, she said. And thus the seed was planted.

  But back to the garage. The owner looked at the cane I was leaning on, the pink plastic patch over my bum eye, and assigned me to change the brake linings on a LaSalle sedan. I told him I didn’t know how. He told me anyone can change brake pads, and showed me how it was done. I did it, and started doing the same sort of job on a Ford. The LaSalle owner reclaimed his vehicle, drove away, returned within minutes with all wheels smoking and began screaming at the boss. The boss told me he was having a hole dug under his house for a basement and the men he’d hired to dig had just quit. Was I better with a shovel than a wrench? Bad leg, I said, and just out of five months in the hospital, but I’d try. So I shoveled, got a day’s pay, and came back the next day to continue. But the bells, whistles, and sirens sounded. Japan had surrendered. The war was over. Everyone quit work and I caught a ride downtown to join the celebration.

  Not everyone was celebrating. I joined a Marine corporal sitting at a Main and Broadway bus stop and we talked about why we didn’t feel happier. We didn’t solve that so we talked about what we’d do now. Neither one of us knew but I spent a moment or two trying to imagine myself as a writer—whatever that might be.

  That night I went downtown again to see what was happening. A band was playing at the USO center and when a very slow tune came along I limped over to a girl sitting by the wall and asked her to dance. Her name was Barbara, she was tall, had freckles and very long, very shiny red hair. She asked me about my leg. I to
ld her, and she told me she lived with her father and was enrolling as a freshman at the University of Oklahoma. When the USO shut down for the evening I took her home on the trolley and we made a date for the next day. Her father was home when I came to pick her up. He said he had a bunch of drill stem and other oil field equipment he needed to get out to the Navajo Reservation for work on a shut-down oil well he was trying to revive. Could I drive a truck? I said I could learn. Could I go tomorrow? Why not?

  Those of you who remember Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road and its madcap 110-miles-per-hour race across the American West with crazy Dean Moriarity behind the wheel should begin imagining the exact opposite. We formed a caravan of two worn-out trucks, credible only to those old enough to remember the days of gasoline and rubber rationing when vehicles were kept running with bailing wire and hope. I’ll call Barbara’s dad Roger, a burly short-tempered Irishman. He drove the first truck, pulling a flatbed trailer overloaded with pipe and steel drill stem. I drove something smaller, carrying odds and ends, with Barbara as passenger. We didn’t drive fast, because Roger’s truck would barely creep up long hills and one of my duties was to pull over, jump out, and serve as a sort of human emergency brake, limping along behind his vehicle on the steeper slopes, ready to slide blocks behind his wheels when his tired old engine demanded a rest. One of Barbara’s jobs was to keep truck number two rolling along behind while this was being done. Another was to keep me awake when exhaustion set in. Because while Roger couldn’t drive fast, he drove consistently. We stopped for gasoline, to refill radiators, check oil, grab a loaf of bread and baloney. No rest stops. One relieved oneself at gasoline stations and one slept a few minutes here and there when something stopped us.