The medical sergeant took my X-ray plate and led me to an office where a major, dressed in a white lab coat and uniform, filled out paperwork. Not even glancing at me, the major tapped the film plate and said, “Those white spots on the lungs come from childhood TB. Lots of country folks have them. Nothing to worry about.” He made a note on the clipboard page and signed it, finally looking up at me.
I tried to keep from grinning at him but failed—I wanted to kiss his feet. The major rolled his eyes, returning to his paperwork.
I was taken back to the lieutenant’s desk in the recruiting office. The officer checked the revised paperwork, nodding. He stood and told me to repeat after him: “I…state your name, MacLeod…do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States…and I solemnly swear to bear true allegiance to the United States of America…and to serve them honestly and faithfully, against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever…and to observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States of America…and the orders of the officers appointed over me.”
I nearly stuttered for the first time in years as I completed the oath of enlistment.
The lieutenant welcomed me to military service. “Maybe not the Army, though.” He lifted another page. “While they were shooting your X-ray again, I took a second to review your exam. You made the top score, more than good enough to get into the Air Corps—sorry, the ‘Air Force’ they’re calling it now. You can go to Fort Jackson in South Carolina, with the Army, or I can send you to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. San Antonio.”
If Rienzi rejected my love, then the unexpected luck of getting to San Antonio would turn to heartbreak. On the other hand, Jay had gone through Fort Jackson and Chet planned to do so; maybe we could all end up together at the same base one day. I quickly told the lieutenant my decision. Then I had a lot of time to ponder the wisdom of my choice. A sergeant gave me a set of orders to carry, a train ticket, and meal vouchers to use along the way. He also gave me an authorization to spend that night in the Armed Forces YMCA in Columbus. The slips of paper shook in my hands like the rattle of rain on a tin roof.
*
My train was due to leave at oh-seven-hundred the next morning. I left the YMCA dormitory at oh-four-hundred, unable to sleep, and wandered the abandoned streets.
When I arrived at the depot, the Seaboard train waited there already: a dozen cars of shiny steel and dark windows behind a sleek diesel engine. A constant tickle ran from my stomach into my throat and back down. My fingertips tingled with a thousand pinpricks and sweat made my scalp itch. I paced the length of the locomotive and back, again and again, until my feet ached in the dress shoes. The ribbed steel of a passenger coach felt cool and slick beneath my fingertips. I had to keep touching it to show myself it was real.
A Negro man about Nat’s size pushed a broom across the concrete platform, catching gum wrappers and cigarette butts. After the second time I passed him, he said, “Got a big trip ahead of you?”
“I just joined the military. I’m a little nervous.”
“Be a piece of cake for a country boy like you.”
“Even dressed up, I look like a rube, huh?”
He leaned on the broom handle and shrugged. “Don’t know ’bout that, but I seen the back of your neck twicet now. Fella don’t get that kinda sun strolloping around town.”
“You think it’ll be a walk in the park?”
“Relax, Country. You’re used to taking shank’s mare everywhere you go—marches are gonna be like going to grandma’s for you. Town dudes’ll be falling out all around and you’ll have to keep from whistling.”
I showed him the Bible in which I’d folded my orders and tickets. “I brought along something to read.”
“Can’t go wrong with the Good Book. You pick out your passage for the day?” He explained, “Every morning, I close my eyes, flip open to a page, and point. Sometimes, it gives me something to study on all day long and into the night.”
I followed his instructions, touching my finger to Psalm 78, verse 38. I read aloud, “Yet he was merciful; he forgave their iniquities and did not destroy them.”
“That’s powerful-good advice, Country. You can ponder that one your whole trip.”
I did, all the way to San Antonio.
EPILOGUE
On New Year’s Day 1947, Robert Bryson stopped his old sedan for me along US 27. I lowered my thumb and tucked my hand into the warm pocket of the Air Force greatcoat bundled around me, overjoyed to see him again. The ebony finish on his Pierce Arrow straight-eight gleamed like his eyes behind their bent wire spectacles. He still waxed and polished his sixteen-year-old baby more often than the car-crazy San Antonio airmen fooled with their latest hot-rods.
I opened the door, saying, “Thank you, sir.” My chilled breath jetted out in short smoke-signal puffs. “This is getting to be a habit with us.”
He took a long pull on his bottle of water while I got settled beside him, placing my military cap over a knee. I put an olive-drab knapsack on the floorboard with barely a sound. Traveling light, I’d only packed spare clothes and my moldering Bible. I often pondered how it provided for my physical escape, while Papa used his trying to escape his sins. Apparently, they’d caught up with him.
Mr. Bryson said, “I heard from Nat that you were gone for good.”
“I thought so too,” I said, “but a part of me never left. I keep having these reminders, smelling or tasting something or hearing a voice that makes me think of home.”
“For better and for worse. I know that feeling.” Mr. Bryson checked for traffic and pulled onto the highway, driving fast. We talked about the Air Force, and he asked, “You gonna fly one of them, what-chu-call-em, fighters?”
“No, sir. My birthmark is too recognizable; pilots can’t have distinguishing marks. Being grounded doesn’t bother me, though—they let me fly a desk in an office.”
The car interior was much warmer than the outside, where my buzz-cut scalp had suffered windburn, but the air carried a stale reek. I’d grown used to daily baths, tooth brushings, and indoor toilets, but I knew that I’d once exuded the very same odors.
Mr. Bryson gave a big sigh and murmured, “You back here on account of your daddy?”
“I got emergency leave. My brothers and sister are coming too.” I watched for his reaction as I said, “Jay wrote that Papa had been shot to pieces.”
He nodded, his glasses tilting catawampus on his nose. “Bless his heart, somebody murdered ’im at that sawmill of his. Graveyard dead.”
“Maybe that killer who shot the night watchman came back. Any idea who did it?”
“I ain’t got a clue.”
“But what are folks saying?”
A parenthesis dented his cheek as he grimaced. He slowed the sedan at an intersection and turned onto Hardscrabble Road. With a glance at me, he said, “I don’t listen to gossip. About your mama or anybody.”
I held his brief gaze. “Thank you for that.”
We were all gathering there, a reunion of sorts. Papa’s revolver had lain under Mama’s pillow for years. Did she bother to reload it? I wondered if, with my newfound sense of smell, I could tell whether it’d been fired recently: all six rounds. Surprisingly, I looked forward to asking Mama about it, matching wits with her.
Mr. Bryson stayed quiet after that, so I didn’t push him for more hearsay. The sky darkened to gunmetal gray, and small white flakes curved down at us, looping as they hit the windshield like the flip on the ends of Rienzi’s hair. I touched the breast pocket of my uniform, where I kept a picture of us taken in front of the Alamo. Maybe not the best of omens, but I’d stand arm-in-arm with her at the gateway to hell or anywhere else.
“Well I’ll be,” Mr. Bryson said. “Ain’t seen snow in a month of Sundays.”
We crested a low rise. Ahead of us, a small barefoot boy in overalls and a thin plaid jacket dragged a makeshift sled loaded with firewood, shoulders hunched against the cold. A dozen branches had fall
en off the pile along the way, making a dotted-line path to him. The biting wind had turned his neck a florid pink below short, tawny hair.
I shrugged out of my greatcoat and wrapped it tight to hold in the warmth. As we coasted toward the boy, I pointed him out and said, “Let’s give that little soldier a furlough.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Few books are written without the help of others and none are published without the resources and assistance of a team of supporters.
I benefited first and foremost from my late father-in-law, Vernon McDonald, who related countless anecdotes about growing up in Miller County in South Georgia in the 1930s and 1940s and contributed the front cover photograph. Keenly intelligent, witty, and open-minded, he was a great man as well as a sensational storyteller. While this novel is entirely fictitious, his tales provided the colors and textures of a time long past and a place that no longer exists as he knew it. If you felt like I transported you there—if you could see it, smell it, taste it—if you smarted as Papa’s belt snapped and grinned as you sailed off the tin roof into Lonnie and Nat’s waiting arms—then the credit goes to Mr. McDonald. He owned the time machine; I merely made use of it.
And, of course, I wouldn’t have met him if I hadn’t fallen in love with his winsome and lovely daughter, Kate. She was doubly blessed, having had an equally smart, funny, and kind mother, Betty, from whom she also inherited outer and inner beauty. Really, I was taken with her whole family, her brothers included: Steve and Ashley, good men both. I wouldn’t be a writer today without Kate’s encouragement and belief in me. In fact, I wouldn’t be much of anything.
It’s never easy to have your work critiqued, but I was fortunate to receive excellent advice and spot-on “wordsmithing” from a number of fine writers, including Michael Buchanan, Kathleen Boehmig, John Witkowski, Mark All, and Sid Versaci. I became friends with them many years ago through the Atlanta Writers Club (AWC), among other writing organizations. They and the AWC continue to play an important part in my life, so I’d also like to acknowledge my other best friends in the club—Marty Aftewicz, Valerie Connors, Clay Ramsey, Adrian Drost, Ginny Cavnah, Ron Aiken, Chuck Clark, Amie Flanagan, and John Sheffield—and so many more members I have the honor and privilege to know. Best of luck to all 700+ of them: I hope you will enjoy their books soon if you haven’t already. I wrote this novel a few years before my friends in the AWC Roswell Critique Group could help me improve it further, but I want to thank Tom Leidy, Chris Negron, Jane Haessler, JD Jordan, Ellie Decker, Josh Bugosh, Fred Whitson, April Dilbeck, Daniel Burke, Marre Stevens, Sweta Bhaumik, Emily Carpenter, Gaby Anderson, Trish Slay, Thom Shelton, Luis Nunez, Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh, and the others for their ongoing support and encouragement during my journey through the publication and marketing process.
Thanks too to the scores of fantastic authors I’ve had a chance to meet at AWC meetings, workshops, and other hosted events: their own writing journeys and their spoken and written words have provided me with inspiration and perspective.
I certainly want to express my appreciation to Deeds Publishing—Bob, Jan, and Mark Babcock—for welcoming me and embracing my novel. When you turn over your work to others, it’s a leap of faith for you and for them. Thanks for jumping into the unknown with me, y’all!
Finally, my deepest thanks to my readers. It’s the ultimate leap of faith for you whenever you devote precious time and money to enter a world of someone else’s devising, counting on being entertained at the very least, and maybe desiring a stronger emotional connection to the characters and the story. There are countless other ways you could’ve spent your resources, so my sincere hope is that you thought Bud’s adventure was worth your investment.
-George Weinstein
Roswell, GA
August 2012
AUTHOR’S BIO
George Weinstein is a writer and the Managing Director of the Academy for Academic Leadership, a consulting and educational services company. His work has been published locally in the Atlanta press and in regional and national anthologies, including A Cup of Comfort for Writers. His first novel, the children’s motivational adventure Jake and the Tiger Flight, was written for the nonprofit Tiger Flight Foundation, which is dedicated to the mission of leading the young to become the “Pilot in Command” of their lives. He wishes that there had been such an organization in Laurel, Maryland, where he misspent his youth.
George is the former President of the Atlanta Writers Club (AWC) and former everything-else there too. Having run out of term-limited positions for him, in 2012 the AWC Board bestowed on George the lifetime title of Officer Emeritus, which means he can never leave. Not that he would, but it’s nice to be wanted. The AWC was established in 1914. George was established only a few years later; he has a self-portrait in his attic that looks like hell.
Read more about George and his written work, including some additional stories about Bud MacLeod and his rambunctious family, bless their hearts, at www.georgeweinstein.com.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Prologue
Book 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Book 2
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Book 3
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Author's Bio
Hardscrabble Road Page 31