The two friends of Gerald, including me, empathized with him by also wearing cow’s teeth during the battles, or even by slanting up the corners of our eyes with charcoal. The other friend was Willard Dinsmore, the smartest of us all, and when Gerald and Willard and I put our heads together in games requiring strategy, intelligence, and cunning, especially with the brawn provided by our Nazi conspirators, the Axis often routed the Allies. Before long, I’ll introduce you to Willard, and I think you may like him best of us all.
But for now, and for a while, it’s Gerald we’re looking at: pudgy, freckled, towheaded, the least and last of three insufferably identical and homely brothers whose names, you are quick to understand, rhymed, the way we all pronounced his as “Jerl.” But no one except his mother called him that. Nearly everyone had a nickname of sorts, as if it were bad luck to speak someone’s actual name. Even their pronunciation of my diminutive, “Dawny,” turned it into a kind of nickname, but ever since the war started all of the Axis and the Allies called me Ernie rather than Dawny because I had once in a moment of extravagance or enthusiasm blurted that I thought Ernie Pyle was a greater man than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Likewise, Gerald Coe had once blurted that his ambition in life was someday to become mayor of Stay More. This little town, lost as it was in the remote fastnesses of the Ozark Mountains, had never had a mayor, unless you considered that in the old days, more than a century before, Jacob Ingledew, who’d founded the town with his brother Noah, had proclaimed himself Mayor, mostly just an honorific title. Being least and last always makes one a little more alert and sensitive than those who are first and foremost, and Gerald, or “Mayor Coe” as others began to call him in jest, perceived that Stay More might not continue its relentless decline and population loss if there was a responsible civic government to rescue it. Those who truly knew him, as few did (you and I among them), had every reason to believe that he might actually run for and be elected to the post someday, and, further, that he might actually save the dying town.
Of course mayor is pronounced simply “mare,” and that is what we all of us had come to call him, Mare Coe, a name that lent itself to further teasing (a nickname is by virtue of its bestowal a form of teasing) because of the association with female horses or nightmares or, as Sog Alan usually called him, Mary. Taunts could be easily made: “Mare smokes marijuana,” or “Stay Mare of Stay More,” and, prophetically, Mare would join the marines.
Despite his pudginess and his flaring freckles and the anonymity that comes from being identical to two nondescript brothers, Mare had qualities that not only made him the natural commander of the Axis but also, had he lived long enough, might actually have elevated him to mayor of what was left of the community of Stay More. He was smarter than his brothers. Until he graduated from the eighth grade at fourteen, he was Miss Jerram’s star pupil, her pet, and (some of the kids gossiped) her secret lover. Whether or not there was actually anything going on between them (and nobody ever testified the two had ever been seen together outside of school), it is a fact that she was the only one who could distinguish him readily from his brothers. The triplets not only looked exactly alike (they didn’t dress identically but wore an indistinguishable wardrobe of overalls and old shirts) but also talked identically, with the same inflections and only the subtlest differences in their choice of words, which did not escape Miss Jerram’s keen perception: she knew, for example, that Mare’s favorite negative was “Over my dead body,” and his favorite affirmative was “Fine and dandy,” and she smiled at him more often than she did at his brothers. Because she was nice to him, he went out of his way to please her, and even after he’d graduated he helped her conduct that great award-winning scrap drive and that great knit-off.
Paradoxically, as far as the War Effort was concerned, the members of the Axis were much more patriotic than the Allies. When the great knit-off began, I was still in the second grade, and a Red Cross lady came from the county seat, Jasper, to show all of us, including Miss Jerram, who didn’t know how, the art of knitting. We learned how to click those needles and loop those skeins for Our Boys Overseas. Soon all of us—except the Allies, who thought it was sissy, and refused—were adept at making knitted squares out of the khaki or olive drab yarn from the wool from the sheep of Stay More that had been dyed in advance. When enough squares were finished, they’d be stitched together into blankets, and although these blankets disappeared we’d be told how they’d become part of “Bundles for Britain” and thus warming and comforting to Our Boys Overseas.
The Axis girls, like Ella Jean Dinsmore, whom I secretly was crazy about from the second grade on, graduated from doing simple wool squares to knitting mittens, socks, and even sweaters for Our Boys Overseas, and the Stay More public school, thanks to the Axis, won the Newton County prize for Most Yarn Intertwined, a certificate that Miss Jerram dressed up with a frame trimmed with knitting and hung over the blackboard.
We did even better for her War Effort Scrap Drive, rounding up virtually everything metallic in the whole town, whether it was scrap or not. Mare Coe drove the hay wagon and mule team we used to load up with the collection—wagon-wheel rims, hoes, plow points, broken anvils, shovels, everything. We asked him, “What iffen they’re still a-using whatever piece of metal we want?” and he replied, “Jist ast ’em if they kin someways live without it.” Somehow we talked the few remaining menfolk out of their hammers, saws, and plowshares, the womenfolk out of their washtubs, pots, pans, and tableware, and all of the children sacrificed their jumping jacks, pocketknives, and any other play-pretties made out of metal. Doc Swain was permitted to keep his essential medical tools, but everything else metallic in the town had to go. As the result of our efforts, it was declared that we’d collected more scrap than any other rural school in the whole state of Arkansas, and Miss Jerram got the privilege of christening in absentia a liberty ship.
Doing things for the War Effort diverted us Axis from our constant battles with the Allies, and allowed us to feel truly superior to the Allies, who remained more interested in games and dirty tricks than in the patriotic activities of the War Effort. The Allies had commandeered as their clubhouse (“Operations Headquarters” they called it) an old house built up in a tree nearly a century before by Noah Ingledew. It couldn’t exactly be called a “tree house” because that conjures up an image of a jerry-built hovel constructed by children, and Noah Ingledew’s house had been an entire double-wing dwelling erected high up in a sycamore tree. The Allies always got the best of everything, and we Axis were consigned to using as our Operations Headquarters an unused back room in the old Ingledew General Store; nobody knew we were there. The Allies’ clubhouse in that sycamore tree was just north of the village, and they had dug foxholes all around the perimeter of it to protect it, and not even Mare Coe could lead a successful assault on those foxholes. Whenever we played War, the Axis usually had to defend the village proper, the main street along which we’d dug so many foxholes that the grown-ups complained. The Allies were usually victorious in assaulting and taking the village from us. The only times we truly beat the Allies were Saturday afternoon baseball games. With Mare’s help as pitcher, our Axis baseball team could sometimes beat the Allies, who always after a defeat vowed to get even in the trenches, but even there, hurling the old potatoes that we used as hand grenades, Mare could often defend us against the assault of the Allies. The Allies would rather play any sort of game than expend energy on behalf of Our Boys Overseas.
The only thing the Allies were willing to do to help the War Effort was collect grease, and they had an ulterior motive for that: it was a way to get into the movies. As his own contribution to the War Effort, Doc Swain offered to take whoever could collect a lard bucket of grease to the Saturday night movies at the only movie theater in Newton County, the Buffalo, on the square in Jasper. The Buffalo was our Rialto. Doc not only was one of the few people in Stay More who possessed an automobile, but also because he was a doctor he had a “C” sticker for it that per
mitted him to fill his tank at Dill’s Gas and Service. During the war there was a national speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour, and on the dirt road between Parthenon and Jasper there was one little level straightaway, where, if Doc floored the gas pedal on his old heap, he could get it up to thirty-three or thirty-four mph, almost the speed limit. Each Saturday night Doc took the winners of the grease-collection contest the distance of more than ten miles to the movies at the Buffalo, where the admission for kids was a lard-bucket of grease, meaning usually bacon fat or pork renderings. Often I was in the group of kids who crowded into Doc Swain’s car with their grease buckets, and I got to watch the Movietone News before the serial and the feature came on. That newsreel was always full of the latest thrilling shots of how we were winning the war in Germany and the Pacific. And I decided, for the benefit of all of those in Stay More who couldn’t go to the movies, to start a newspaper reporting the leading items from the Movietone News. Naturally my main motive was to start giving myself the experience I’d need to replace Ernie Pyle when he retired.
I mail-ordered for $1.98 plus postage (earned from my after-school job as stockboy and general factotum at Latha Bourne’s general store) a “hectograph,” or gelatin board, which was a simple wooden tray filled with hard purple gelatin on which a master sheet (hand-printed with purple pencil) could be impressed and duplicated up to a maximum of about fifty copies. My little newspaper, never running to more than four pages except at Christmas, had reached a circulation of not more than forty at the time I met you. I had decided to call it The Stay Morning Star, a clever play on the town’s name. Putting out the newspaper required me to get up before school every Monday and, after giving postmistress Latha Bourne twenty copies to put in the post office boxes, carry the other twenty around to the RFD mailboxes of those who didn’t have post office boxes. It was a long hike, up hill and down vale, in bitter weather that past winter, and sometimes I was tardy for the beginning of school and caught what-for from Miss Jerram. Then on Sunday afternoons I had to hike around to each of those places again and, after being announced by their barking dogs or knocking on their doors, I inquired whether any of them had anything to say that was worthy of being reported in the next day’s paper.
On these reportorial rounds I never stopped at the yellow house, out on the Butterchurn Holler road, occupied by the strange bearded old man known only as Dan. I wasn’t afraid of him, as most of both the Allies and Axis were. His house wasn’t scary; in fact, it was quite pleasant and, being painted yellow, was bright and cheerful. But somehow I sensed, or knew, or had once been told, that he did not want visitors, or company, or friends. Although he’d been there longer than I’d been alive, he was still a “furriner,” meaning not a native of these here mountains. He lived there with a girl, presumed to be his daughter, who was never seen in the village, who had never attended the Stay More school, who was reputed to be beautiful by those who claimed to have caught a glimpse of her. I left my little newspaper in their box each Monday morning, but I never even thought of stopping there on Sunday afternoons to ask for news. Keeping to themselves as they did, what news could they possibly have anyhow?
For that matter, few others had any news. The most common thing I heard, after all the effort to reach some of those remote cabins and houses, was “Nothin this week, Dawny, sorry to have to tell ye.” But occasionally, like fishing for hours without a nibble and then landing a lunker, I got something truly newsworthy: a son had been in the D-Day invasion and survived. A son had been killed on his ship in the Pacific by something called a kamikaze, fiendish, which is where a pilot dive-bombs his plane with himself still in it. A son had been in something called the Battle of the Bulge and was wounded. I reported all of this excitement in a style that Ernie Pyle would have admired, even if he’d have grinned at the way I imitated him. My stories never gave away any troop movements or sank any ships.
But usually my reportage was mild and limited to such things as sports (AXIS TAKE ALLIES 3–0 ON MARE COE’S NO-HITTER) and, the main source of news, visits. Sunday afternoons, the time of my news collecting, were by tradition the time of the week for people to visit one another, and I could usually fill a page with items like WHITTERS VISIT DUCKWORTHS, COES VISIT DILLS, or DINSMORES VISIT DINGLETOONS.
But one of the “visits,” I discovered, involved a man too old to serve with Our Boys Overseas who was visiting with a young woman whose husband was one of Our Boys Overseas. “She’s jist my little niece, didn’t ye know?” he said to me, and I reported that fact in my story about the visit, which, however, got me into trouble. When I was hurt and puzzled by the uproar, dear Latha Bourne tried to explain to me, “He’s not really her uncle. They’re not even any kin to each other, which is unusual for any two people in this town.”
The small costs of putting out The Stay Morning Star (mostly for the newsprint, in short supply) were borne by the advertisers: Latha Bourne’s General Store (“Limited Supply of Post Toasties Just In”), Dill’s Gas and Service (“Three Shade Trees, No Waiting”), and even now and again (although I later learned the AMA wouldn’t have approved) Doc Swain (“Come in and ask about what streptomycin can do for you”). I was still in love with Latha Bourne, which is what people kept on calling her although she was now Mrs. Every Dill, but I never made a nuisance of myself around her anymore; I worked as her stock-boy, janitor, and delivery boy for a little while after school each day, and once a week I took down her dictation for her ad in my paper, for which she paid me another fifteen or twenty-five cents, depending on whether it was a full-page ad or just a half-pager, although I protested that I could just consider those ad costs the rent on the little side room of her store that she let me use as my newspaper office.
No one, least of all myself, considered my newspaper to be in competition with the county’s weekly, published in Jasper and printed on a real press, which came out on Thursday afternoons and, to my pleasure, always carried the Scripps-Howard syndicated column of Ernie Pyle, which I read religiously. Ernie Pyle was my first experience of the writer whose life is almost as important as his work, and therefore an inspiration to become a writer, not just to entertain or inform people, not just to reach you, but to be admired as a writer. Ernie was just an old Indiana farm boy; like myself, he had been put to the plow at the age of nine, and like myself he had hated it. Now he was on the front lines, living and sweating with the troops, dodging enemy fire, risking his life to report in his homespun, folksy style the doings and dreams and daring of the enlisted men. He made heroes out of common men.
He always identified the soldiers he interviewed by their hometowns, even their street addresses, and I always watched closely to see which ones were from Arkansas. The very week after the Allies broke my arm, he wrote about some of the boys in Ordnance over in France (Ordnance is a branch of the Army, not a town in France), “The soldiers did a lot of kidding as they sat around taking rusted guns apart. Like soldiers everywhere they razzed each other constantly about their home states. A couple were from Arkansas, and of course they took a lot of hillbilly razzing about not wearing shoes till they got in the Army, and so on. One of them was Corporal Herschel Grimsley, of Springdale, Arkansas. He jokingly asked if I’d put his name in my dispatch. So I took a chance and joked back. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘except I didn’t know anybody in Arkansas could read.’
“Gentle Reader, everybody laughed loudly at this scintillating wit, most of all Corporal Grimsley, who can stand anything.”
That column was a revelation, in more ways than one. It let me know, for the first time in my life, that the rest of the world thought there was something wrong with the fact that we preferred to go barefooted in Stay More, not that we didn’t know what shoes are, but because we didn’t need ’em. And there were some of my subscribers who couldn’t read The Stay Morning Star because they never needed to learn how.
But the main revelation of that column, startling me, was that it gave you a name. Gentle Reader. I had been calling you “Frien
d” just as a temporary handle until I found a better one. With Doc Swain and the others I had recently seen a movie at the Buffalo called The Thief of Bagdad, one of the ever-popular Arabian Nights films, and it had a fabulous genie in it, and I thought of calling you Genie, but there were a couple things wrong with that: a genie does one’s bidding, and you won’t ever do mine (even though I’ll try to make you, farther along); and Ella Jean Dinsmore, my secret passion, sometimes was called “Jeaner” or sometimes just “Jeannie,” which sounds just like Genie. So I had to give up that notion.
Gentle Reader, that would do just fine, and it would be many more years before I discovered to my dismay how promiscuous you are, reading not just me and Ernie Pyle but everybody else. Still, I’ll always like to remember my first meeting of you, and my first discovery of your name.
So when everyone in school, including Miss Jerram herself, was given the opportunity to inscribe my plaster cast, I remembered you. Most of them just wrote their names, or some stupid silly little thing like “Roses are red, Violets are blue…” or added clever variations, “…Sugar is sweet, but you stink ha ha!” Lack of originality was rampant: “When you get married and live like pigs, Don’t treat your wife like Maggie does Jiggs,” or “Yours till the Statue of Liberty sits down and the ocean wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry.” Some were threatening: “Your leg next time,” wrote Sog Alan, “Dry up and blow away,” wrote Larry Duckworth, and “Go climb a weed,” wrote Jim John Whitter. Miss Jerram wrote “Here’s hoping someday you’ll discover that others aren’t as dumb as you think they are.” Ella Jean had little to say, but it was sweet: “Hope you go far with the Stay Morningstar.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 77