The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  But the Battle of Dinsmore Trail had differed from all our other battles in that the stakes were much higher, the spoils of war more serious. The only spoils of a ball game is the final score. The only spoils of trench warfare is a bit of territory that is given back sooner or later. But the spoils of Dinsmore Trail was the living, breathing, lovely body of a girl, who was spared from untold assault of a lascivious nature. Thus, the divine intervention was not only necessary but morally right.

  Satisfied that they’d won the battle if not the outcome, the Allies behaved themselves only long enough to permit some very important things to happen outside our control, outside our world, things that would change our own little lives—or at least mine—forever. The first of these was revealed to us when Latha came into the office of the Star late one Thursday afternoon, carrying her radio, which was running, and said, “Dawny, listen here to the radio! The president is dead!”

  “Which president?” I asked.

  “Of our country,” she said. “President Roosevelt died.”

  She fiddled with the dial, and picked up a station, but all of the stations were announcing the same thing: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aged sixty-three, had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, while sitting to have his portrait painted. Harry Truman of Missouri was going to be sworn in as the new president.

  “What’s a cerebral hemorrhage?” I asked Latha.

  “I think it’s where your brain just bursts from all the blood in it,” she said.

  “And it killed him?” I asked incredulously, not willing to accept the fact that our president no longer existed.

  “He’s dead,” she said.

  Time stopped. Somehow it seemed as if this was the end of the world. I would learn that most other people felt the same way, but for me, who never had a father nor a grandfather, at least not worth mentioning, it seemed a personal loss beyond measure. THE PRESIDENT. He was the president when I was born and I was nearly twelve years old and expected him always to be president. I started crying, which I rarely did. I looked at Latha, and she was crying too, and then she reached out her arms and held me, and we both had a good long cry.

  Upset as I was, I wanted to just take off running across the hills until I found a place where nobody ever died anymore. But I had the presence of mind to remember my duty: as a newspaperman, I had to bring out an Extra. The Stay Morning Star had never had an Extra before, not even when Mare died. But here it was late Thursday afternoon, and the next issue not due until Monday morning. Latha wanted to rush out and spread the news, but I asked her kindly to give me a chance to get my Extra out first, and I went right to work on that hectograph, penciling the magic purple master copy as fast as I could, with a headline that covered practically the whole front of the page: F.D.R. NO MORE. On the back side of the page I transcribed all of the meager facts that the radio was offering about the circumstances of his death, and I even included an editorial, “Much as we like our neighbor Harry Truman, we don’t see how he or anybody else could possibly know how to be president.” Then at the top of the first page I wrote “I¢” and drew a circle around it, and put the pages to bed in the gelatin, quickly printing fifty copies. I gave some to Latha to sell to anybody who came in the store, and then I said, “Go ahead and tell whoever you want.”

  “We ought to ring the school bell,” she suggested. I looked at her as if she’d suggested we ought to fly to the moon. Nobody ever rang the school bell, certainly not for school. We knew there was an old bell up there in the little wooden cupola atop the ridge-pole of the schoolhouse, but I couldn’t remember ever having heard it ring. “If we ring the bell,” Latha offered, “everybody will come a-running, and you can sell the paper like hotcakes.”

  “I never sold hotcakes,” I said. But she had a great idea, and we put it into effect. Without even stopping to ask Miss Jerram’s permission (she probably wouldn’t have granted it), we went into the foyer of the schoolhouse and I climbed the crude ladder nailed into the wall that led to the bell’s cupola, where an old rope was coiled. Latha explained that the rope used to be hanging down so you could just reach out and pull it to ring the bell, but the rope hadn’t been needed for years so it was stored away up there. I got it and pulled it, and Latha helped pull it, and sure enough that old bell commenced a-pealing, crashing these big round gongs that sounded like “bomb!” and “doom!” depending on whether the clapper was hitting one side or the other as the bell swung from the rope’s tug.

  As Latha had predicted, people came running, starting with Miss Jerram, from just across the road. “Dawny!” she hollered. “That bell don’t never ring!”

  I held out a paper. “Extra!” I hollered back at her. “Extra! Read all about it!” She took one of the sheets, and I added, “One cent only.”

  “Do ye want me to have to run back over to the house to get a penny, or can you just extend my credit until the next time I see ye?” She took a look at the paper’s oversized headline, and asked Latha, as if she didn’t trust me, “Is this true?” and when Latha nodded, Miss Jerram burst into tears.

  Other people were running up to see why the bell had been ringing, and I was collecting pennies right and left. All in all, I made twenty-eight cents that day, probably the most I’d ever earned in one day in my life, and I was beginning to believe that I was destined truly to follow in the footsteps of Ernie Pyle.

  Miss Jerram canceled school for one day in Roosevelt’s memory. She had never missed a day of school before. Since that day was Friday, we didn’t meet again until Monday. It was a long weekend. Folks wanted to know how I had picked up the news of the president’s death so quickly, and while I refused to tell, Latha finally admitted to Doc Swain that she had a radio. Naturally she offered to let him listen to it, as her husband Every Dill was already doing, and their daughter Sonora, whose husband Captain Hank Ingledew was in the Pacific, and Sonora’s friends Doris and Jelena Dinsmore, whose husband Billy Bob Ingledew was fighting in Germany…and before long there was a huge crowd at Latha’s store wanting to hear the radio and listening not only to all the follow-ups and tributes on the death of FDR but also to the symphonic music and, after a while, the return to regular programming, with Let’s Pretend and Grand Central Station and Meet Corliss Archer, and even all of those endless commercials for Rinso and Lucky Strike and Wheaties. I realized the radio could very easily put my newspaper out of business, and I was sorry that the rest of the town knew that Latha had a radio and was willing to share the sounds coming from it.

  But she had to impose restrictions. When folks started trying to hear shows by Jack Benny or Edgar Bergen that went on past her usual hour for shutting up the store, she told me to post in the next issue of the Star an announcement to the effect that the radio would be available for listening only for two hours before and after the usual time that the mail truck came in the morning and the mail was put up in the boxes. Even so, for four hours a day people crowded into the store to listen, and while they were there they often bought something from the store, particularly soda pop and candy when it was on some rare occasion available, and Latha realized the radio was good for business. Her restrictions didn’t apply to me: if I wanted to hear Captain Midnight or Hop Harrigan or Terry and the Pirates after the regular listening hours, she would let me, and I gladly donated the twenty-eight cents I’d earned from that Extra to the cost of helping replace her radio’s battery. Some of the other listeners chipped in also, and we began buying her a new battery pretty often.

  Latha opened the store every morning (except Sundays) at six-thirty, as she had been doing ever since she’d bought the store from Bob Cluley back in 1932. Since the mail truck came about ten o’clock, she wouldn’t turn on her radio before eight for the benefit of any customers, and by then I was usually in school. But the Wednesday morning after the president’s tragic end, as I was on my way to school Latha came out on the store porch and said “Dawny” and beckoned to me. I climbed the porch. “Come inside,” she said, and held
the door open for me. There weren’t any customers in the store yet; it was too early for the radio to go on. But the radio was on. “Sit down,” she said. I sat on one of the straight-backed chairs that were scattered here and there around the store. “I was listening to the news a while ago,” she said. “You know, sometimes before I unlock the store of a morning, I catch the six o’clock news.” She paused, took a deep breath, and I waited. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Dawny. If it breaks your heart, I’m going to hate myself for having to be the one who told you.”

  “Please tell me, whatever it is,” I said. “I can take it.”

  “Not this,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “This is going to keep you out of school. This is going to lay you lower than I’ve ever known you to be.”

  “Am I going to have to bring out another Extra?” I asked, wondering what it could be. Had Harry Truman died too? Or been assassinated?

  She smiled wanly and said, “Maybe you’ll want to, if you can.”

  “Well, I’m a newspaperman. I’m brave. Like Ernie Pyle, I can put up with anything.”

  Latha sobbed. She buried her face in her hands, and when she could finally raise her blurry eyes to me, she said, quietly, “That’s it. Ernie Pyle has been killed. On some island in the Pacific. The Japanese shot him.”

  “Don’t tease me, Latha,” I said sternly.

  “Oh, Dawny,” she said. “I wouldn’t tease you.” And she began fiddling with the radio, trying to find a station that might be broadcasting news. But unlike the day Roosevelt died, the stations apparently didn’t feel that Ernie Pyle’s death was worth constant announcement.

  I was too stunned to have any immediate feeling at all. I had no feeling whatsoever. My mind couldn’t even manufacture some disbelief. I waited while Latha changed the dial from one station to another. There weren’t very many stations that could be picked up during the daytime. It was better at night. “Did they say if they checked his dogtags to be sure it was him?” I asked. She shook her head. “Did they say if he had any last words or anything?” I asked. She shook her head. “Did they say what the soldiers thought about it?” I asked.

  “No, they just told what happened,” she said.

  “Did they get the Jap who did it?” I asked.

  “They didn’t say,” she said, fiddling with the dial.

  Soon it was eight o’clock and people were wanting to get into the store to hear their favorite morning shows on the radio. Latha did something I’d never known her to do before during store hours: she turned the OPEN/CLOSED sign so that CLOSED was facing the world. People stood outside looking through the windows, and some of them knocked on the door, but Latha wouldn’t open it.

  Finally, during the commercial break of some show, an announcer said, “This news bulletin came from Blue Network Correspondent Jack Hooley broadcasting from Ie Shima, four miles west of Okinawa, where at ten-fifteen A.M.—or last night U.S. time—Ernie Pyle, America’s greatest frontline war reporter, was killed by Jap machine-gun fire.

  “Pyle was riding in a jeep with Colonel Joseph Coolidge of Arkansas, commanding officer, when a burst of fire sent them scrambling out of their jeep into a roadside ditch. After a few minutes they peered over the edge of the ditch, and the Jap machine gunner, concealed on a ridge, opened fire again. Colonel Coolidge ducked back to find Pyle dead beside him, shot three times through the temple. ‘He never knew what hit him,’” Coolidge said.

  I yelled at the radio, “Did they git the Jap?”

  “Just before Pyle had left to join the invasion of Ie Shima, he had told another correspondent that he didn’t want to go. But he said the GIs didn’t want to be there either, and that he was going along until the shooting was finished.

  “Admiral Nimitz called him ‘one of the greatest heroes of the war,’ although Pyle never fired a shot. This message just in from the White House: President Truman said, ‘The nation is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle…’”

  I demanded of President Truman, “But did they kill the Jap that shot him?” And I began crying in frustration that I did not know. I would never know. For the first time, I was greatly ashamed to be a Jap. I didn’t want to be Jap any more. I didn’t want to be anything, I didn’t want to ship out across the Pacific and take Ernie Pyle’s place on the front lines. I didn’t want to run a newspaper. But it was as if two ghosts were returning from the dead to give me orders: Mare telling me that I had to be Jap for his sake, and Ernie telling me that I had to keep on putting out the newspaper for his sake.

  “Thank you,” I said to Latha. “You might as well open the store.” And I went into my newspaper office and cleaned my hectograph and took my magic purple pencil and began hand-lettering another Extra. Out of respect for the late president, the letters of the headline weren’t nearly as large, but still they took up a good deal of the front page: ERNIE PYLE IS KILLED. My editorial was tearstained and blurry, but legible: “He died as he lived, with his boots on, in the front lines. Soldiers everywhere lost a buddy. Young newspapermen everywhere lost their finest ideal.” In the news story itself I further editorialized: “We should be proud that the person with him when he died, the last person he saw on this earth, was an Arkansawyer, Colonel Joseph Coolidge of Helena, commander of the 77th Infantry Division.”

  Before I put the Extra to bed, another bulletin came in on the radio and Latha summoned me to listen to a transcription of an interview with Colonel Coolidge describing Ernie’s last moments. The Arkansawyer felt that the Jap sniper might have detected a glint from the antenna of the colonel’s radio and assumed this meant a commanding officer, and thus opened fire at the jeep after letting other vehicles pass. Colonel Coolidge reported that after they had ducked into their ditch, Ernie had raised his head and smiled and asked, “Are you all right?” The Jap fired again, and those were Ernie’s last words, directed to an officer near him but symbolically meant for me.

  For the rest of my life, I would hear Ernie Pyle occasionally asking me, “Are you all right?”

  I didn’t need Latha to go with me to ring the bell. School was still in session when I got there, and I was tempted to explain to Miss Jerram why I was absent, but I just went ahead and started ringing the bell. Miss Jerram was at the head of the pupils as they all rushed into the foyer to see who was doing it, and Miss Jerram hollered, “You again, Dawny! Now who’s the Extra for?”

  I gave her a copy, and then, since I wasn’t going to give away Extras that were worth one cent each, I announced to all my classmates, “Anybody got a penny? Here’s another Extra.” But nobody had a penny on them. So I let them have one copy free, suggesting, “Pass it around.”

  “Dawny,” Miss Jerram said sternly, “you can’t just go a-ringing the bell anytime you take a notion. This Pyle feller may not be as big a man to the rest of us as he was to you.”

  “What do you know?” I demanded of her. “Just what in hell do you know?”

  “You go stand in the corner!” she commanded me. “You caint talk to me like that!” She held out a long finger pointing to a corner of the schoolroom.

  But the first customers summoned by the bell were arriving in the schoolyard, and I ignored her in order to peddle the Extra to them. They were, I was disappointed to discover, disappointed. The ones who paid a penny demanded their money back after finding out the reason for the Extra. Others had to know the reason for the Extra before making payment, and then refused to pay. Later I discovered that the dozen copies I’d left for Latha to sell in the store remained unsold. All told, only four copies of my second Extra were eventually purchased, not enough to pay for the paper it was printed on.

  I don’t know which made me feel worse, Ernie Pyle’s death or the fact that nobody cared. It was hard for me to distinguish the two reasons for feeling miserable. I didn’t go back to school for the rest of the week. Latha didn’t mind me hanging around the store, and she even gave me a few chores to keep my mind and hands busy, but no doubt she was getting tired of the sight of
me moping around all over the place.

  Two days after the Jap killed Ernie, although it wasn’t on the radio and we wouldn’t know about it for another week or so, William Robert Ingledew was killed in the siege of Berlin. Billy Bob was Hank’s kid brother, a carpenter by trade, who was the husband of either Jelena or Doris Dinsmore, Ella Jean’s and Willard’s twin big sisters, or maybe the husband of both, and the father of a baby girl, Jelena, that one or the other of them gave birth to. It was ironic that the war in Europe was practically over—if it hadn’t been, Ernie Pyle would have still been there instead of on those stinking Japanese islands, but in one of the last battles necessary to take the German capital, Billy Bob, like Ernie, had been killed by sniper fire.

  When the War Department notified us of Billy Bob’s death, there was pressure on me to bring out another Extra. But I had learned my lesson with the failure of the Pyle Extra. Some folks and kids thought that I was prejudiced against Billy Bob because he had been a member of the Allies before he’d taken up full time husbanding with Jelena and Doris. I didn’t hold his Allied views against him. I just had never known him very well, certainly not as I had known Mare, and I argued that since there hadn’t been an Extra for Mare Coe, there shouldn’t be one for Billy Bob.

  As a concession, I devoted one regular issue of the Star to Billy Bob’s death, with his obituary and announcement of the memorial service, and stories about the collapse of Berlin and the way those Italians had killed their dictator, Mussolini, and his mistress and strung them up upside down. That regular four-page issue had gone to press and was waiting for delivery on Monday morning when, as I was delivering the copies for Latha to put in the post office boxes, she told me the six o’clock news had reported that Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva Braun had committed suicide in Berlin. Now that was cause for an Extra, but there I was with a regular issue about to go out, so I just folded an extra Extra sheet inside of it with a big headline HITLER QUITS. I sold a few of those, too, in addition to all the ones that went to all the subscribers anyhow. And most people didn’t know that the Extra wasn’t for Billy Bob.