All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  Whoever it was that tried to worship where he wasn’t wanted, it was not Alfred Dyer. He was for decades the superintendent of the African Methodist Episcopal Sunday school and led the choir. He knew the Bible so well, his daughter said, that on hearing any scriptural quotation he could instantly tell where it came from. As he was shaking the grates and setting the damper of our furnace, it seems likely that the Three Holy Children, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, were more present to the eye of his mind than the little boy listening at the head of the cellar stairs.

  After our house there were two more, and then Ninth Street dipped downhill, and at the intersection with Elm Street the brick pavement ended and the neighborhood took on an altogether different character. The houses after the intersection were not shacks, but they were not a great deal more. Grass did not grow in their yards, only weeds. There was usually a certain amount of flotsam and jetsam, whatever somebody more well-to-do didn’t want and had found a way to get rid of. The Dyers’ house was just around the corner on Elm Street. It was shaped like a shoebox and covered with green roofing paper. Elm Street was the dividing line between the two worlds. On either side of this line there were families who had trouble making both ends meet, but those who lived below the intersection didn’t bother to conceal it.

  As I sorted out the conversation of the grown people in my effort to get a clearer idea of the way things were, I could not help picking up how they felt, along with how they said they felt. While they agreed it was quite remarkable that Alfred Dyer’s son William had got through medical school, at the same time they appeared to feel that in becoming a doctor he had imitated the ways of white people, as darkies were inclined to do, and done something that was not really necessary or called for, since there were, after all, plenty of white doctors. Apart from the doctors, the only things I can think of that the white people of Lincoln were at that time willing to share with the colored people were the drinking water and the cemetery.

  BILLIE Dyer’s mother was born in Sedalia, Missouri, the legal property of the wife of a general in the Union Army. Her father and mother ran away and were caught and returned, and the general put her father on the block and he was sold to someone in the South and never heard of again. When her children asked what the place where she was born was like, she told them she couldn’t remember. And that nobody could come and take her away because the slaves were freed, all of them, a long time ago, and there would never be slaves again.

  For things that are not known — at least not anymore — and that there is now no way of finding out about, one has to fall back on imagination. This is not the same thing as the truth, but neither is it necessarily a falsehood. Why not begin with the white lady? When he took the clean washing in his express wagon and knocked on her back door, she called him by his brother’s name. She couldn’t tell them apart. He didn’t let on he wasn’t Clarence.

  The smell of laundry soap was the smell of home. With steam on the inside of the windows you couldn’t always see out.

  It was raining hard when school let out. Some children had raincoats and rubbers they put on. He ran all the way home, to keep from getting wet. He threw open the front door and fought his way through drying laundry to get to the kitchen, where his mother was, and said, “Mama, I’m starving,” and she gave him a piece of bread and butter to tide him over.

  With his hands folded and resting on the edge of the kitchen table, he waited for his father to say, “O Lord, we thank Thee for this bountiful sustenance.…” Pork chops. Bacon and greens. Sausages. Fried cornmeal mush. In summer coleslaw, and sweet corn and beets from the garden.

  Saturday night his mother took the washtub down from its nail in the kitchen and made him stand in it while she poured soapy water over his head and scrubbed his back and arms. When she said, “Now that’s what I call one clean boy!” he stepped out of the tub, his eyes still shut tight, and she threw a towel around him, and then it was Clarence’s turn to have the inside of his ears dug at with a washrag.

  In Sunday school, making the announcements and leading the singing, his father seemed twice as big as he did at home. Preacher told them about the hand: “Think of it, brothers and sisters and all you children, a hand — just a hand all by itself, no arm — writing on the wall!” For Sunday dinner they had chicken and dumplings, and sometimes there were little round egg yolks in the gravy.

  He said, “Mama, I don’t feel good,” and her hand flew to his forehead. Then she went and got the bottle of castor oil and a big spoon, and said, “Don’t argue with me, just open your mouth.” Lying in bed with a fever, he listened to the old mahogany wall clock. Tick … and then tock … and then tick … and then tock … If he told his mother a lie she looked into his eyes and knew. Nothing bad could happen to them, because his father wouldn’t let it happen. But if any of them talked back to him he got a switch from outside and whupped them. It wasn’t even safe to say “Do I have to?”

  His sister Mary didn’t want to go to school, because the teacher made fun of her and said mean things. The teacher didn’t like colored children. “Why can’t I stay here and help you with the washing and ironing?” Mary said, and his mother said, “You’ll be bending over a washtub soon enough. Go to school and show that white woman you aren’t the stupid person she takes you for.” After he finished his homework he helped Mary with hers. It was hard to get her to stop thinking about the teacher and listen to what he was telling her. “Nine and seven is not eighteen,” he said patiently.

  He fell asleep to the sound of his father’s voice in the next room reading from the Bible. The patchwork quilts were old and thin, and in the middle of the night, when the fire in the kitchen stove died down, it was very cold in the house. One night when he went to bed it was December 31, 1899, and when he woke up he was living in a new century.

  When he brought his monthly report card home from school his mother went and got her glasses and held it out in front of her and said, “Is that the best you can do?” Then she put the report card where they could all see it and follow his example.

  IF my Great-Aunt Ev’s name was mentioned, my mother or my Aunt Annette would usually tell, with an affectionate smile, how she cooked with a book in her hand. They didn’t mean a cookbook, and the implication was that her cooking suffered from it. She had graduated from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and spoke several languages — which people in the Middle West at that time did not commonly do. The question “What will people think?” hardly ever crossed her mind. I have been told that my grandmother was jealous of her sister because my grandfather found her conversation so interesting. When her son Hugh Davis brought Billie Dyer home to play and they sat with their heads over the checkerboard until it was dark outside, she set an extra place at the table and sent one of the other children to ask Billie Dyer’s mother if it was all right for him to stay for supper. Before long he was just one more child underfoot.

  When he was alone with Hugh he thought only about what they were making or doing, but he never became so accustomed to the others that he failed to be alert to what they said. The eternal outsider, he watched how they ate and imitated it, and was aware of their moods. He learned to eat oysters and kohlrabi.

  The first time they played hearts he left the hand that was dealt him face-down on the table. “Pick up your cards,” Hugh said. “You’re holding up the game.” The cards remained on the table. Mr. Davis said, “When your father told you you must never play cards, this isn’t the kind of card-playing he meant. He meant playing for money. Gambling.” Hugh, looking over his shoulder, helped him to arrange them in the proper suits. The hand that held the cards was small and thin and bluish brown on the outer side, pink on the inner.

  At home, at the supper table, he said, “At the Davises’ they —” and his sister Sadie said, “You like it so much at them white folks’ house, why don’t you go and live with them?”

  He and Hugh Davis were friends all through grade school and high school. On Saturdays they went fis
hing together, and when they were old enough to be allowed to handle a gun they went hunting. Rabbits, mostly.

  With a dry throat and weak knees and a whole row of Davises looking up at him solemnly, Hugh embarked upon the opening paragraphs of the high-school commencement address: “The Negro is here through no fault of his own. He came to us unwilling and in chains. He remains through necessity. He inhabits our shores today a test of our moral civilization.…” This must have been in the spring of 1904. I imagine there was a certain amount of shifting of feet on the part of the audience.

  ON his way to school, Billie Dyer had to pass an old house on Eighth Street that I remember mostly because there was a huge bed of violets by the kitchen door. I was never inside it but Billie Dyer was, and in that house his fate was decided. The house belonged to a man named David H. Harts, who was of my grandfather’s generation. He had fought in the Civil War on the Union side, and been mustered out of the Army with the rank of captain. Though he had no further military service, he was always spoken of as Captain Harts. He was a member of the local bar association but applied himself energetically to many other things besides the practice of law. He was elected to the State Assembly, served a term as mayor of Lincoln, and ran for governor on the Prohibition ticket. His investments in coal mines, real estate, proprietary medicine, and interurban railroads had made him a wealthy man, but he was not satisfied to go on accumulating money; he wanted the men who worked for him to prosper also. Because coal mining was a seasonal occupation, he started a brick factory, so that the miners would have work during the summer months.

  Everybody knew that Billie Dyer got very good grades in school, and Captain Harts’s son John, who was four years older, would sometimes stop him on his way home from school. After a visit to the icebox they would sit on the back steps or under the grape arbor or in his room and talk. At some point in his growing up, John Harts had eye trouble sufficiently serious that the family doctor suggested he stop studying for a while and lead a wholly outdoor life. For months he lived all alone in a cabin in the woods. Every three or four days his father would drive out there with provisions. Occasionally he stayed the night. John Harts tried not to count the days between his father’s visits or to wonder what time it was. Denied books, his hearing became more acute. He recognized the swoosh that meant a squirrel had passed from one tree to another. He heard, or didn’t hear, the insects’ rising and falling lament. The birds soon stopped paying any attention to him. He made friends with a toad. As he and his father sat looking into the fire his father told one story after another about his boyhood on a farm in Pennsylvania; about the siege of Vicksburg; about how when they were floating past what looked like an uninhabited island in the Mississippi they were fired on by Confederate infantry; about how when they were defending a trestle bridge some fifteen miles south of Jackson, Tennessee, Henry Fox, a sergeant in Company H, ran across the bridge in full view of the enemy and brought relief at the end of the day; how when they were stationed between the White and Arkansas rivers, a large number died of the malaria from the cypress swamp; how he was captured and used the year he spent in a military prison to study mathematics and science. Even though John Harts had heard some of these stories before, he never tired of hearing them. Lying awake, listening to the sound of his father’s breathing, he knew there was no one in the world he loved so much. Sometimes his father brought his older brother and came again early the next morning, so that his brother would be in time for school. One Saturday he brought Billie Dyer. With their trousers rolled above the knee, they cleaned out the spring together. When it got dark, John Harts saw that Billie Dyer wished he was home. He talked him out of his fear of the night noises by naming them. There was a thunderstorm toward morning, with huge flashes of lightning, so that for an instant, inside the cabin, they saw each other as in broad daylight.

  There is no record of any of this. It is merely what I think happened. I cannot, in fact, imagine it not happening. At any rate, it is known that when John Harts went away to college he wrote to Billie Dyer every week — letters of advice and encouragement that had a lasting effect on his life. At twenty-one, John Harts went to work as an engineer for the Chicago & Alton Railroad, and while he was operating a handcar somewhere on the line an unscheduled fast train sent the handcar flying into the air. People surmised that: he didn’t hear or see the locomotive until it was suddenly upon him, but in any case the flower of that family was laid to rest in Section A, Block 4, Lot 7 of the Lincoln Cemetery.

  From time to time after that, Billie Dyer would put on his best clothes and pay a call on Captain Harts and his wife. When he graduated from high school, Captain Harts said to him, “And what have you decided to do with your life?” At that time, in Lincoln, it was not a question often asked of a Negro. Billie Dyer said, “I would like to become a doctor. But of course it is impossible.” Captain Harts spoke to my grandfather and to several other men in Lincoln. How much they contributed toward Billie Dyer’s education I have no way of knowing, but it does not appear to have been enough to pay all his expenses. It was thirteen years from the time he finished high school until he completed his internship at the Kansas City General Hospital. This could mean, I think, that he had to drop out of school again and again to earn the money he needed to go on with his studies. On the other hand, given the period, is it wholly beyond the realm of possibility that he should have come up against instructors who felt they were serving the best interests of the medical profession when they gave him failing marks for work that was in fact satisfactory, and forced him to take courses over again? In July 1917 he came home ready to begin the practice of medicine, but America had declared war on Germany, the country was flooded with recruiting posters (“Uncle Sam Wants YOU!”), and they got to him. He was the first Negro from Lincoln to be taken into the Army.

  2

  IN 1975, a Dallas real-estate agent named Jim Wood, wandering through a flea market in Canton, Texas, bought an Army-issue shaving kit, a Bible, and a manuscript. He collected shaving memorabilia and they were a single lot. Nothing is more improbable or subject to chance than the fate of objects. On the flyleaf of the Bible was written, in an old-fashioned hand, “To Dr. William H. Dyer from his father and mother.” The manuscript appeared to be a diary kept by Dr. Dyer during the First World War. Months passed before Wood bothered to look at it. When he did, he became so interested that he read it three times in one sitting. He was convinced that Dr. Dyer must have made a significant contribution to the community he lived in, wherever that might be, and to the medical profession. So, for several years, with no other information than the diary contained, he tried to find Dr. Dyer or his heirs. Finally it occurred to him to write to the Lincoln public library.

  The diary is a lined eight-by-twelve-inch copybook with snapshots and portrait photographs and postcards pasted in wherever they were appropriate. That it escaped the bonfire is remarkable; that it fell into the hands of so conscientious a man is also to be wondered at.

  What seems most likely is that Dr. Dyer’s wife was ill and that someone not a member of the family broke up the household. But then how did the diary get to Texas from Kansas City? It is eerie, in any case, and as if Dr. Dyer had gone on talking after his death, but about a much earlier part of his life. When the odds are so against something happening, it is tempting to look around for a supernatural explanation, such as that William Dyer’s spirit, dissatisfied with the life he had led (the unremitting hard work, the selfless dedication to the sick and to the betterment of his race), longed for a second chance. Or, if not that, then perhaps wished to have remembered the eight months he spent in a half-destroyed country, where the French girls walked arm in arm with the colored soldiers and ate out of their mess pans with them, and death was everywhere.

  On the first page of the diary he wrote, “With thousands of others I decided to offer my life upon our Nation’s altar as a sacrifice that Democracy might reign and Autocracy be forever crushed.” In 1917, the age of public eloquen
ce was not quite over, and when people sat down on a momentous occasion and wrote something it tended to be a foot or two above the ground.

  Three hundred friends and neighbors were at the railroad station to see him off, on a Sunday afternoon, and he was kept busy shaking hands with those who promised to remember him in their prayers. Somebody took a snapshot of him standing beside his father and mother. Alfred Dyer’s rolled-brim hat and three-piece suit do not look as if they had been bought for someone else to wear and handed on to him when they became shabby. He is a couple of inches taller than his son. Both are fine-looking men.

  From the diary: “Mother and Father standing there with tears in their eyes … when I kissed them and bade them farewell.… My eyes too filled with tears, my throat became full, and for miles as the train sped on I was unable to speak or to fix my mind upon a single thought.”

  His orders were to proceed to Fort Des Moines, a beautiful old Army post, at that time partly used as a boot camp for medical officers. He was disappointed with his quarters (a cold room in a stable) and did not at first see the need for a medical officer to spend four hours a day on the drill field.

  After two months he was moved to Camp Funston, in Kansas. It was the headquarters of the 92nd Division, which was made up exclusively of Negro troops — the Army was not integrated until thirty-one years later, by executive order of Harry Truman, The barracks at Camp Funston were still being constructed, and thousands of civilian workmen poured into the camp every day, along with the draftees arriving by train from Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, Arizona, and Texas. He was assigned to the infirmary of the 317th Ammunition Train, and when he was not treating the sick he weeded out recruits who were physically unfit for military service. The year before, he had fallen in love with a young woman named Bessie Bradley, who was teaching in a night school. His free weekends were spent in Kansas City, courting her. In January and February, an epidemic of cerebrospinal meningitis swept through the camp and kept him on his feet night and day until it subsided. In March, he got a ten-day furlough and took Bessie Bradley to Illinois and they were married.