That was how I coped, you know, as the years passed, although I’m not sure if coping was ever something I gave any conscious thought to or not. I wanted a small life in a safe town, a life where I felt secure and could love my wife and raise my kids. I’d seen plenty of this world’s evils and I knew there were plenty of dangers ready to grab at folks. My good friend Pete started having more problems because of his drinking. I saw less and less of him. Some folks called him a drunk, but I never did. After a time, he and his wife divorced, which was sad all around. Sure, I blamed the war for that. Pete could have done things differently, I guessed, but I knew it wasn’t easy for a man to put his past aside. Gradually, Pete and I lost contact.
When I thought about Pete, I vowed those things wouldn’t happen to me, but I couldn’t say for sure, you know, I really couldn’t. Sometimes in the dark of night when I was lying next to Dorothy and she’d be asleep, I’d be peering up at the ceiling, listening closely for any strange sounds. Maybe somebody was trying to bust into the house. Maybe it was the wind pushing on the sides of our home, making the floor creaky, the walls crackling. Maybe it was a ghost. When I slept, these dreams kept haunting me. Memories raced back to me in the night. So much shooting. So much killing. I never talked about these things to anyone. Nobody wanted to hear about the war, I figured. We’d won. America had triumphed over the Nazis and Imperialist Japan. Now we were all aiming to get on with our lives. Rebuild, celebrate, buy that new washing machine—that was the mood in the newspapers. What the world had gone through seemed too hard for anyone to ever talk about again. Once, when Wayne was in ninth grade, his history teacher was talking about the Battle of the Bulge, and Wayne said, “You know, I think my dad was in that.” The teacher just laughed at him.
I didn’t want to end up like one of those sad-story veterans, you know. You’d hear whispers of other fellas having a rough go of it. It was always, so-and-sos been drinking too much, or that fella tore up the bar real good. I always carried a .25 pistol strapped to my ankle. I’d carried it ever since I got back from overseas. I always told people it was for the snakes we sometimes get around Clinchco, but the truth was that after the things I’d seen during the war, I plumb felt safer with that pistol there. It dawned on me early on that civilian folks don’t work out their differences the same way as men do in the military. In the Army, if I was aggravated with somebody, I either needed to obey him, fight him, or shoot him. When you weren’t in the Army anymore, things didn’t work that way. Still, on those nights I couldn’t sleep, I feared that would be me one day. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Dorothy. I loved her with all my being. Same with the kids. I’d never do anything to hurt the life we had together. That’s what made me afraid, way back in my mind. Me getting crazy. Me running away and living somewhere on the street without a job. Me getting thrown into jail for a fight I didn’t walk away from.
Sports helped. I found that my mind rested whenever I was coaching, so I coached basketball at the high school and Little League baseball in the community. When I was coaching, I wasn’t thinking about anything bad, see. My mind was only on the game, and my mind stayed focused on something good. I had the power to do that, you know. I could consciously tell my mind to go to a good place by where I decided that my feet would take me. The kids called me Coach Powers, or just Coach D, and I found it satisfying to help a kid find his way in life.
One spring afternoon, oh, maybe about 1960, I was coaching the Clinchco Cardinals twelve-year-old boys’ team. We’d had winning seasons before, but this year we were struggling. It was only the third inning, and the Nora Braves, a team from down the road, were already skunking us—21 to 6. I was never one of these uncompetitive coaches who doesn’t care if his team wins or not. But I wasn’t a yeller like some other coaches, either. I wanted to win, same as any man, but I never screamed and hollered at the kids. That was never my style.
Well, I did a double take when the other team’s coach smirked at the score, hollered for his star pitcher to hit the pine, then called over Rufus Edward Nickles from right field. It was an insult to our team, and I understood what the other coach was getting at. Rufus was about nine years old, as scrawny as a wet squirrel. Everybody called him Shanghai, and his ears stuck out like a late model Ford with the doors open. He’d broken his arm after tripping a few years back while carrying a coal bucket, and his elbow stayed twisted like a sore thumb. His daddy had died a few years back, and I think the only reason anybody let him play was because his big brother was on the team. So now the coach was ordering little Shanghai to pitch. That decision set me to wincing. It didn’t matter how badly we were losing. Putting Shanghai on the mound was gonna break that kid wide open.
Shanghai trotted over. He must’ve decided to give it his best shot, for he wound up and chucked the ball. His first pitch hit the dirt early and rolled over the plate. He dug in his toes and threw his second. It was wide by a country mile. Shanghai’s third pitch looked so low and inside it nearly scuffed the shins of my batter. Kids were laughing now. Shanghai was red-faced and sweating. But he spit in the dirt and threw his fourth—a wild outside attempt at a curveball, which walked our batter.
Things went from bad to worse for their team. Shanghai threw eight more balls in a row and walked our next two batters. Now he had loaded bases on his hands. Kids from both teams were hollering. Well, I’ll never forget the look of dismay in Shanghai’s eyes when he saw that the next player up was Johnny Fleming, one of my best hitters. Poor old Shanghai tossed the meat right over the dish. I mean, that pitch was right over the plate, just begging to be walloped. Johnny hit a grand slam, and all our four players jogged around the bases and came home to score.
I’ll give that boy credit. Shanghai was plumb determined. The game continued, and he kept tossing them in. My players kept whacking them out. The coach left him in the game just to get our team’s goat, and the game ended with the score 21 to 19 for the Braves.
The kids scattered as soon as the game was over. I’ve seen some long faces in my life, but Shanghai’s was about the longest. I didn’t know whether the boy was about to cry or if he was the type who’d take off running, but I walked over to him anyway, put my arm around his shoulders, and said, “Well, cheer up, son. Your team won.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but I stunk.”
“You know, if you’re ever gonna make it as a pitcher, you gotta learn how to pull the trigger on the curveball,” I said, with all honesty. “I’m not fussing at you, I’m just telling you—you can’t oversqueeze the ball.”
He looked at me. For the first time in six innings, I saw a grin. I guessed he’d caught the key part of what I said, which was what I wanted him to catch, for he asked, “You actually think I’m going to be a pitcher someday?” Shanghai’s face grew real intense. I reckoned if he’d had a notebook right then, he’d be scribbling down everything I said.
I liked to see that in a kid, and a bright idea came to me. After a game, there’s always plenty of work to be done, see. Cleaning up the field, sweeping the dugout. So I said, “I’ll tell you what, you help me put all the stuff up, and I’ll go ahead and buy you a milk shake. We’ll talk some more about pitching.”
He grinned big at that idea. So that’s what we did.
That was the start of a good little friendship between Shanghai and me. Shanghai started practicing his pitches. He didn’t even have a baseball of his own, but he threw rocks up behind the supply store until his arm was sore. He’d come hang around my practices, and after a while he got his shot and started pitching for his own team. Wouldn’t you know it, the boy showed real improvement.
The year Shanghai Nickles turned twelve, his team had a champion season. They went 17 and 1, and Shanghai was responsible for pitching fourteen of those games. After the regular season, he played on the all-star team. I was coaching that team, and it was made up of the best kids from all over the league. I picked him first.
When Shanghai turned fourteen, he started pitching for men’s leagues.
I let out a low whistle at that news. Men’s leagues in coal mining towns are made up of some pretty rough customers. Some mine owners even brought in guys and handed them easy jobs, just so they could pitch on their league teams. Well, Shanghai held his own just fine in those men’s leagues. I noticed no one else came to watch him play, and as often as not I’d be the first to shake his hand when he came off the field.
Years went by, and Shanghai grew up. He moved out to California and pitched as a semi-pro player for the Glendale Leagues. It was a real job, getting money to play baseball. He never made it to the majors, but it didn’t matter none. He was playing at a real high level, and then he retired from baseball, moved back to Clinchco, and became active around the community. He got married. Had kids. Landed and held a good job in radio. Announcing the community games became one of his regular tasks. I told myself that boy turned out real well, and I grinned to think that of the kids I coached, Shanghai’s story was just one of many successes. One kid went on to become a doctor. Others I coached became bankers and businessmen, teachers and firemen. It wasn’t the jobs they held that made me proud so much as the character instilled in them. They loved their families and communities and were proud to be doing something worthwhile with their lives. I reckoned that was time well spent, out on the mound all those years with those kids, and I knew at the core of me that these kids and their futures were what we’d been fighting for over in Europe.
Most days, most weeks, most years were real fine for me. I settled into a routine, and that’s what made life smooth for me. Our own kids grew and kept growing. We went to movies and ball games as a family. Every Saturday we’d go to a little joint called the Pink Room to meet our friends, eat steak, and dance. It was the only real place to go out to for miles around, and sometimes we’d hang around until three in the morning, just laughing and having a good time together.
I’d still have those sleepless nights once in a while. Sometimes two, three hours would go by and I’d get up and pace around in my workshop, trying to shake the darkness out of my head. On those nights I’d think about deeper things, you know, about how my life was going. Mine was a basic life except for that one dark area of the war. I tried praying. I was pretty sure God held some answers to those unsettling questions. But whenever I prayed, I was never quite sure what to say.
I’d always considered myself a Christian, you know. Not that I ever talked about religion with anybody. That business, I figured, is best kept between a man and God. But Mama and Daddy were always churchgoers, so I was, too, at least when it wasn’t fishing season. At first, Clinchco only had one church building. Half the Sundays it was used for the Freewill Baptists, and the other half was the Methodists’ turn. Dorothy and me got active in the church like most people do in the South, and we were never folks for sitting around with nothing to do, so we taught Sunday School for a lot of years. I liked the thought of a church helping kids make good decisions, so for a while I became the Sunday School superintendent and helped organize all the kids in their departments.
Now, I never fussed about this out loud, but I confess I never much liked the pictures of Jesus that they showed around to the kids at Sunday school. Those pictures often showed him all long-haired and hollow-cheeked, looking as sad and miserable as if he’d swallowed a lemon, you know. So whenever it was my turn to talk to the kids, I’d tell them about the Jesus I read about in the Bible. He was always on the run, turning over tables in the temple, doctoring up sick folks, arguing against the hypocrites, calming stormy seas. I pictured Jesus as a man you wanted to follow into battle. A man you could trust with your life. Sort of like Major Dick Winters, you know. Folks from the Missionary Baptist Association came around in the 1960s, and we liked what they had to say, so Dorothy and me became charter members of a new church they were starting. The church started meeting in houses at first, then we built a building some ways down the road. The congregation grew in size a bit, but we always stayed a small church. Folks were friendly there, and the church had a calm, laid-back atmosphere.
One Sunday a few years later—I was in my mid-forties then—our preacher was talking to us in the pews about getting baptized. The act of baptism showed other folks that you had accepted the hospitality of God, he said. It showed you’d left your old life behind and had decided to start living in the new. Well, how he described baptism like that made me think real hard. I was still carrying around a heavy load of things I wanted to leave behind. Those nightmares, you know, those memories of things I’d done, things I’d seen. So I thought I might do that. One Sunday morning I got down in those waters and the preacher dunked me and I came up again, wet and smiling and fresh, with people singing hymns afterward. That was how I wanted to keep on living—new, like how the preacher described—and I reckon getting baptized after the war helped me go that direction. I never talked about religion with anybody, even after that. But I found it more peaceful when I prayed. And I started sleeping better. I did.
So that’s how it went. Years flew by, and all that time I was a working man at the mine caring for my family and enjoying our hometown and coaching sports and going fishing whenever I had the odd free moment, and not doing much else. Our kids grew up. Wayne became a schoolteacher, and a real good one. He ended up marrying that sassy girl, Sandy, the one who used to throw rocks at my car on my way to work. Sandy became a schoolteacher also, and she didn’t throw rocks anymore. We were pleased with how things turned out in the end. Margo grew up and married a fine man named Seldon Johnson who worked high up with coal mining products. They did real well for themselves and moved about an hour away. In time, four grandchildren came along—three boys, Jake and Luke and Clay, and a little girl named Dove. They were about the best thing that could ever happen to a fella. The oldest one, Jake, started calling me Pub even before he could hardly talk, and sure enough I had a new nickname that stuck. The grandkids called Dorothy “Guy,” so that nickname stuck as well, and for years to come we were known all over simply as Pub and Guy. I gave nicknames to all the grandkids right back. I called Jake, Jakefellar. Luke was Pookus. Clay was Clayfellar. And Dove was Woo.
The grandkids came around our house a lot, and Dorothy and me liked that fine. We were always helping them out with schoolwork, science projects, taking them fishing, whatnot. Once, Jake and I built a model hurricane with a wooden frame around a hot plate and a tub of water. It cooked up a fine storm. Another time one of the grandsons busted his G.I. Joe. He was sniffling and crying, convinced it would never be fixed. But Dorothy said, “Well, let Pub fix it.” It was his bedtime then, and my grandson went to sleep a sad little man. But I went to tinkering with that G.I. Joe down in my workshop, and sure enough by morning, that toy was sitting on the kitchen table, good as new. We all got along fine as friends even, and when Jake was about five, he got bunk beds in his room. He said I was his best friend and asked me to have the first sleepover with him. So I did, me in the upper bunk, him in the lower, and we ate popcorn and told funny stories and had ourselves a real swell time. Luke always enjoyed drawing as a little fella, so one day I commissioned a painting from him. I wanted an owl perched on a tree branch, and after he drew it up and brought it to me, I paid him what was agreed, then raved to everyone about how good it looked. It did look good, you know. That painting hung in my workshop for years. And Dove, well, a fella knows exactly how lucky he is when he’s got a granddaughter as cute as her. She was always toddling around and getting into mischief, and we had ourselves a grand ole time, we did.
Those were the seasons of life a fella likes a lot. I was real satisfied with how things turned out, you know. I’d come back from a day’s work and sit on my porch and have a cigarette and a drink. On a nice evening, that porch was the happiest place on earth. A train would be running through the mountains, and I’d look out on the world and ponder things. Nothing much in particular. Mostly, just how happy I was.
Now, I did enjoy a regular cocktail most every evening, it’s true. When it came to drinking, I did do th
at a bit, but fortunately it never bit me like it did some men. I liked Early Times whiskey, and once in a long while I drank bourbon. I always enjoyed a vodka tonic. That and a screwdriver were my favorite drinks. We went to several Easy Company reunions over the years, and the son of George Luz, after he got older, would always bring me a screwdriver first thing after I got in the door. I kept in contact with the guys okay. Fellas get busy when they’re raising families, but we’d write letters back and forth. Occasionally we’d go visit them, or them, us. Gordon and Lipton came by, Popeye and Skinny Sisk. McClung. It was real good to see them. Real good.
The fellas from Easy Company used to joke with me that I was basically just a mountain man at heart, and that I was into drinking moonshine. I’d never admit or deny it. But one time Sergeant Taylor was giving me a hard time before a reunion. We’d call each other up once in a while, you know. So I said to him, “Well, why don’t you bring me some moonshine sometime.” So that year at the reunion they brought me a pickle jar with some White Lightning in it. That was a pretty big joke, and I took a sip and said to the fellas, “You know, you have to cook it twice to make it this good.” I couldn’t tell if it was good moonshine or not, but I figured that I’d let on like I did.
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