Shifty's War

by Marcus Brotherton

  A woman bent over me. She wore a long gray coat-dress, and her hat bore a tiny crimson cross. Don’t know how much time passed. The side of the road looked closer now, and she was flicking the seal of a morphine syrette, getting ready to stick my leg. The kid from D Company lay a few feet away, the kid going home to his girl. His sandy hair was matted red now, his long legs motionless, his complexion colorless when a medic pulled a blanket overtop his face.

  The drug hit and everything got swirly and I thought about heading in for my mother’s homemade chocolate pie. So creamy and good, and I was there sitting in our kitchen again. Mama wore her Sunday dress with her best apron tied behind her and she was telling me to stay at the table and have seconds on dessert. Don’t worry about me, Mama, I said. My name’s Sergeant Darrell C. Powers, and I won General Taylor’s lottery. I’m coming home soon, Mama, I’m really coming home soon.

  2

  NO ORDINARY COUNTRY

  Maybe a young man needs to travel to another country before he fully appreciates his home. He needs to abandon everything familiar, you know, travel a road that heads another direction. Then it dawns on him how good he had it at first. He remembers all over again being a boy and the rasp of his daddy’s chin against his cheek, keeping within him that warmth of knowing his daddy would be home again after work. Or maybe he remembers the thick, salty smell of bacon sizzling in his mama’s pan, so different from the cold bean soup the chow cook just sloshed in his mess kit. A home filled with bacon smells and a father coming home each night is how it is for some boys growing up, some boys who have it real lucky. That’s how it was for me.

  I was eight years old, nine maybe, and Daddy was walking softly off my left when he stopped fast in the bottom of a holler and held his hand up for me to do the same. He shaded his eyes then started walking again. We were hunting squirrels deep up on Frying Pan, the name given to the mountain Daddy’s folks had owned longer than anybody could remember. Two cabins squatted up on Frying Pan. Daddy’s family stayed up top in the smaller cabin in summers, then come winters they moved down to the bigger cabin on the river bottom where they was closer to town. I never lived in either of Frying Pan’s cabins myself; we lived in a rented house in town by the time I was born, but the mountain was still as much our land as our skin was our skin, and on that mountain of bounty was where we hunted our food.

  I must explain that folks in southwest Virginia throw round the word holler a lot, but it don’t always mean yelling. A holler is a depression between two hills, like a valley, but not as deep. Frying Pan was filled with hollers, stacked on each other, and Daddy and I was climbing through these hollers to get to the top. I’d been to the summit plenty of times already in my young life and knew once we got there we were in for a treat. We’d look out and see more of the same thing, ridge after ridge, the sky coming down and brushing those mountaintops, coloring them blue. That’s why you hear of the Blue Ridge Mountains running through this state and others. Those mountains are blue for real. The sun rose as Daddy and me walked, our breathing hung smoky in the early air, and we inhaled the crisp, cool smell of soil and bark. Lots of trees cover Frying Pan. “Deciduous” was the big word Daddy used. It was early fall and those leaves flamed in their colors—yellows, oranges, rubies, and golds.

  “Listen,” Daddy said. He held his hand up again. With the other, he carried his rifle. “What do you hear?”

  “Nothing.” I shrugged. We were the only folks around for miles.

  “It’s not what you think.” Daddy hushed his words, not being harsh with me, but offering me again that question to wrestle with.

  My heart pumped hard in my chest, I heard that—the blood flowing back of my eardrum—was that what Daddy was asking? We’d been hiking for some time already and I was glad to stop and rest. Daddy knew everything about hunting and shooting and he was schooling me in his ways. His name was Barnum Powers and he’d been a private in the 363rd Infantry during the First World War. He fired rifles through the Battle of St. Mihiel and came home alive to love Mama. She was a Scotch-Irish beauty named Audrey, and flowing somewhere deep in her bloodline was American Indian. I knew these things because Daddy told me, but that’s all I knew, particularly about his shooting ways, so I wrinkled my nose and said, “I don’t hear nothing, Daddy, nothing at all.”

  Daddy hiked over to me, his movements whisperlike on the forest floor, and laid his hand thick but gentle over the top of my face. He spread his fingers once for me to see his eyes were shut, too, then gathered his fingers so all was dark. “You’re thinking about only what you know is true, son, but a good hunter uses more than his eyes, you know. Let me ask you again: What do you hear?”

  I tried to hush the pounding in my ears. I tried to see all around me by listening to what I heard. Finally I said, “Dripping, Daddy. I hear dripping from water off leaves.”

  “Good, son. What else?”

  “Wind.”

  “What kind of wind?”

  “A little breeze, I guess. Comes in puffs.”

  “What direction?”

  “From the holler over yonder. North, maybe.”

  “What else?”

  “A sort of a rustling. Mushy. Leaves are moving someplace.”

  “Where from?”

  “Up in that big ole Maple to our right.”

  “Good. And why might those leaves be rustling, son?

  “I dunno. I guess—”

  Bang! Daddy’s hand was off my eyes. He was bringing his rifle down from his shoulder. Smoke drifted out of the end. A bushytailed squirrel lay on the ground, some twenty-five yards to our right.

  “You’ll get the next one, you know,” Daddy said. His eyes were still closed. I don’t know if they were closed while he shot, or if he only closed them again afterward, like a man might do at a sacred place. He had heard that squirrel rustling through the leaves in the tree, same as I had, but he was more certain of what he heard. I didn’t ask more because Daddy was already walking to where the squirrel lay. He crouched over it and unsheathed his knife and I followed his motions. Squirrel is dark meat, flavorful and tender if young. Old squirrels are fit for stewing only, but Mama would brush butter on this in her roasting pan, and it’d make fine eating.

  Daddy removed all four paws at the wrist joint. He used small, careful cuts to open the belly skin without nicking into the muscle wall. He cut down the insides through all four legs and around the rectum at the base of the tail. He handed me the knife and I stripped the skin away from the meat and cut the tail off at the bone. There were seven of us in our family and I knew that Daddy made a hundred dollars a month. In a boy’s figuring, I didn’t know if that was a heap or a little, but Mama said we ate on a dollar a day, and she stretched it hard to go that far, so these squirrels kept us fed. We ate ’em all the time, as well as Mama’s garden in season, chickens that we raised ourselves, and a hog or two we kept up on the hillside.

  Daddy wiped his knife. “Promise me this, son—”

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  “People think hunting’s just being out walking in the woods, but it’s lots more than that. You see things. You hear things. You learn to know everything that moves around you. Might be squirrel, deer, turkey, grouse, might be another man, you know. So you aim well, and aim for the eyes. It means a smaller target, but you have to promise me this—quick, clean kills only. Understand?”

  I nodded without knowing the total of what I was agreeing to, whether Daddy was referring to squirrel hunting only, or to something he learned during the war, or if he knew enough about the troubling ways of the world to fear that his son would someday need to fight similar battles as he had. Soon enough we had that squirrel dressed and were hiking the sides of the hollers again, Daddy and me, this time with me listening for more than I could see.

  Daddy took me hunting a few more times, but mostly I was with my brothers, friends, or on my own. I’d head out before the sun rose, just like Daddy taught me, and start by looking fifty feet ahead, then scan left to
right. Then I’d hike out further and scan right to left and so on, just like that. I practiced my blank stare, where you’re not looking at anything solid, but you become aware of everything in front of you all the way back to your shoulders. Daddy’s words about movement being the biggest giveaway became second nature to me, and I always had an ear inclined to what might be in the trees. I heard wind. I heard snow crunch. I heard raindrops. If a leaf fell behind me, I knew. Might have been a year after Daddy first took me hunting that I came into the house with two squirrels tucked under my arm. Daddy looked them over and said, “Well that’s pretty good shooting, son, you shot ’em both through the eyes, you know.” It was the best compliment he’d ever given me, and I never felt prouder.

  Daddy soon told me I needed to buy my own ammunition, so that meant I needed to earn money. I didn’t know what a boy like me could do around our hometown of Clinchco. All the jobs were for men. Ever heard of Clinchco? Probably not. Picture a bunch of mountains all grouped together with narrow, winding roads lacing through them. Clinchco’s a little speck by the side of one of those roads, far in the southwest tip of the triangle of Virginia. If you climb high enough on any ridge round Clinchco and spit hard enough, you’ll cross one of three state lines and land it on Kentucky, Tennessee, or North Carolina. If you look on a map, you’ll see that Virginia’s midway up the country, but everybody still considers us part of the South. Not Deep South like Alabama, we don’t talk with as much drawl, but we ain’t Yankees, that’s for sure. If you travel about an hour away from Clinchco to the big town of Bristol, you’ll see tan-bricked houses with wide white Greek columns out front, built Southern style, and folks will be real neighborly and ask you your business or make it their business to find out. They’ll be belted solid in the Bible, maybe Methodist, or Baptist like our family, and they’ll believe in God and Jesus Christ and go to church more Sundays than not. Most of ’em vote Democrat on account of the labor unions, and they’ll expect you to work hard if you live among them. They’ll help you if you’re down on your luck, and smoke cigarettes on your porch, and they’ll feed you the best ham and baked beans you’ve ever eaten if you come to visit a spell.

  Oh, I knocked on plenty doors around Clinchco looking for work, but it wasn’t no use. A fella needed to work for the company, and that was that. I’m talking the Clinchfield Coal Mine Company, which was much the only reason our little town ever existed. A few pioneers settled the area mid 1880s and built a grist mill; then come 1913, a railway pushed its way from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to Elkhorn City, Kentucky, and eighteen houses sprung up overnight. One of the railway contractors was a hefty fella named Moss, so that’s what our town was first named. Four years later a post office was built and folks wanted things renamed in honor of the mining company, which began operations that same year. So Moss was no more, and Clinchco now was, and the railroad brought in workers, and that’s the way our town began.

  They came for jobs in all four of the original Clinchfield mines, hardscrabble folks from all over the globe—Greeks, Hungarians, Italians, blacks—mostly by route of Ellis Island; I grew up with a real smattering of ethnic kids. The company needed services for its workers, so it built a school and barber’s office, a church and store. That big ole store had everything in it, groceries, meat, clothes, furniture, and that’s the only place you shopped if you lived in Clinchco. The store had a post office in one end and a drug store on the other, and every year come first of December they’d stock a heap of toys in the front window for our delight. Clinchco, oh, it was a booming place in those years. Maybe two thousand people in its heyday, maybe three thousand, though if you travel there today, the boom is long over and about four or five hundred folks call it home now.

  The company owned our house. The company paid you what they reckoned to pay. At first, Daddy received script. Then the company changed the system, and in the latter 1930s and early 1940s, Daddy was paid cash money, silver dollars. Come payday you’d see this armored truck drive up and two guards climb out with their guns drawn. Later in the 1940s, the company switched to credit cards. Daddy got his card, and how much it said was how much he spent.

  Tennessee Ernie Ford wrote that song about a company store owning a man’s soul, but it didn’t feel that way for our family. Few folks in Clinchco ever complained out loud. Most was into hard work and good behavior. Wasn’t actually a police force in town, but we had a security guard. He’d make sure all the doors were locked and check the office buildings, things like that. One time some boys broke into the drugstore and were caught. Their families had to move away. So that’s what it was. Kids were taught to behave themselves. If you didn’t, your daddy lost his job.

  Never even felt like we were poor, to me. It was the Great Depression, but most all the fathers I knew kept their jobs. Maybe a man worked at the Number 7 Coal Tipple, or he processed at Number 9. Plenty of folks round America had it worse than we did, but it wasn’t all smooth in Clinchco. Coal business goes by jumps, you know. It’ll go along with a lot of demand, then tables turn sudden-like. A lot of business depends on what they call lake orders—when lakes thaw up north, they haul coal across to sell it, but when lakes are frozen too long, then everything slows, and times get hard for a coal town. Daddy kept his job all through the Depression, thankfully, and he never worked down in the actual mines, thankfully. His job was superintendent of supplies, so he bought, stocked, and issued out the various parts the company needed to fix machinery, that’s what he did.

  It took me a week or two of knocking on doors and coming up empty on jobs, but finally I figured I’d need to create my own work. So I found a cloth and turned over a wooden box and shined shoes outside the commissary. Grown-ups like it when a young boy’s polite, and pretty soon I earned enough to buy a real shoeshine kit. From then on I had it made. Every Saturday I coated and buffed those boots and shoes till they shined brown and black. Every dime I earned from my business went into bullets for shooting practice. Well, that’s not true; I kept a few coins for myself. Had heard of an experiment I wanted to try, you know, but was probably twelve years old before I had enough jingle in my pocket to give it a real go.

  Me and a kid named Frank Powers went into the woods one day to test the experiment. Frank had the same last name as me but was no relation. He was my best buddy in all Clinchco and the kids at school called him Pete, but I couldn’t tell you why. An alley ran between the back of our house and the back of Pete’s house, so whenever Pete headed out his door for school he ran through our house on his way down the street. Nobody in my family seemed to mind. Mama often spooned up a second helping of banana pudding on Pete’s plate if he stopped long enough at our kitchen table.

  “Ain’t no way,” Pete said. “Not a chance in hell.”

  “Just stand back,” I said, real quiet, and loaded a bullet in my rifle. I fished around in my pocket and took out a silver dollar. Now, it took a quarter just to buy a box of .22 rifle shorts, so the sacrifice of a whole silver dollar meant I was making a real investment on glory. I flicked the coin high in the air, maybe eight, ten feet, grabbed my rifle hard with both hands, and fired.

  Pete shook his head. “Never woudda believed it,” he said. “Never ever, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

  That big ole silver dollar was sent sailing. Never did see where it landed. A .22 wouldn’t be powerful enough to blow a hole through the center of it, but we both knew I had shot the silver dollar.

  “You’re here to witness, right?”

  Pete nodded. He was no slouch when it came to shooting, neither, but this was my experiment. I fished around in my pocket again, took out a smaller half dollar this time, flipped it high in the air, and pulled the trigger. Pete’s mouth plumb dropped out of his jaw. “Wild Bill Hickok ain’t got nothing on you,” he whispered.

  “Ain’t done yet,” I said. This experiment had cost me a buckfifty already, but nothing was stopping me now. I pulled a quarter out of my pocket, smaller still, gave ’er a flip, and blasted
it clean into the trees.

  “Nickel next?” Pete asked.

  “Nickel.” My voice was still confident. See, I had been planning this experiment for months in advance, practicing by myself with all my spare change. Already I had shot a nickel and knew I could do it. I just hadn’t told Pete about it, so it would look fresh to him. I flipped the nickel and blasted it good.

  “Nice,” Pete said.

  Was the dime I was worried about. Try as I might, I never could hit a dime when I practiced before. None of the kids at school would care about a penny. But they’d ask about the dime. Shoot—I wasn’t even doing this to impress the kids, you know, I was doing it to challenge myself and become good at aiming. So maybe Pete would think the nickel was all that’s needed. Or maybe I had jumped ahead of time and called him to witness the experiment before I was truly ready. There wasn’t any man or boy I knew who could hit a dime with a rifle. I decided to call it quits with the nickel, so I said, “Well, I guess we’ll call it a day then.”

  “Well, hold on,” Pete said. “You’re forgetting something.”

  I toed the dirt with my shoe and sighed. I pulled a dime out of my pocket, flipped it in the air, and pulled the trigger. The dime landed straight down in front of my nose. “Pete,” my shoulders slumped, “that nickel might be all that gets it today.”

  Pete was solemn. “Give it another go,” he said.

  I flipped the dime again. Again no luck. A box of .22 shorts held a hundred rounds. I flipped and fired and flipped and fired and flipped and fired. Finally, my box was empty, my dime still rested in front of me in the dirt.

  “Shit,” Pete said.

  “Shit’s right,” I said. I wasn’t smiling.