Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

  “Yah. Like the fookin’ airport,” Billy said.

  “The what?” Father Hart said.

  “Davenport,” O’Gorman said. “For some reason Billy’s always wanted to go there. I’ve had a hell of a time convincing him it isn’t in New Jersey.”

  “Ah,” Father Hart said, totally bewildered. “Where will you be staying here in town?”

  “They’re going to stay with old Dan. They’ve got lots of room. There’s just Barbara and Mick in that big house with him now,” McBride said.

  “What part of Ireland are you from, Father?” O’Gorman asked McAvoy.

  “Mayo, God help us,” McAvoy replied with his wan smile.

  “You don’t say. What town?” O’Gorman replied. “I’m from Castlebar.”

  “Cong.”

  “Oho. You got so rich on the American tourists at Ashford Castle you’ve come to America to buy real estate?”

  “My father’s a gardener there,” McAvoy said.

  Father Hart was puzzled by the rasp of hostility in O’Gorman’s voice and touched by McAvoy’s humility.

  The meeting began with the usual ritual. Father Hart said a brief prayer. They saluted the American flag and the Irish flag. Then their best tenor, Donal Finch, sang the Irish national anthem in Gaelic. Father Hart was puzzled by the Irish visitors’ silence. Neither sang a note of their country’s song. But Dennis McAvoy caroled it in a lovely tenor voice. The meeting buzzed quickly through the plans for the Sons’ annual trip to Ireland. Then McBride introduced Richard O’Gorman, repeating the information he had already given Father Hart.

  O’Gorman told them that he and his assistant, Billy Kilroy, were here to spread the good news about Ireland’s return to the family of nations. After fifty years of independence, Irish culture was flourishing. All that was needed to complete the nation’s happiness was the recapture of the six lost counties in the north. Then a united Ireland would resume its historical role as the cultural leader of Europe. He descanted on how the heritage of Greece and Rome had been kept alive in Irish monasteries during the Dark Ages, when Germans and Frenchmen and Italians were drawing pictures on rocks.

  Best of all, a united Ireland would permit young exiles such as Kilroy to return to Belfast, where his father and mother had been murdered by British special agents. Resisting the assassins, Billy had brained one of them with a hockey stick and was wanted for what the British called murder.

  “When Billy came to my door,” O’Gorman said, “he looked like a victim of the famine. I’ve adopted him as a son. No one has revealed a deeper enthusiasm, a greater pride, in Ireland’s culture. He was like a man who had been deprived of solid food since birth, which in fact he had, under British rule. No Irish writer, no Irish song, no Irish dance, is permitted in British Belfast. With God’s help and yours, we may someday change that.”

  The entire meeting was on its feet, applauding. Father Hart’s throat was so full, he could hardly breathe. My God, the man rang true. He was the quintessence of the modern resistance fighter, modest, generous, patient. Hart turned to Father McAvoy and said, “What do you think?”

  Tears were streaming down McAvoy’s face. “Would to God I had the ability to preach such a sermon.”

  Desmond McBride rose to ask the members to contribute to the orphanage that Messrs. O’Gorman and Kilroy were supporting in Belfast. Watching the $10 bills tumble into the collection basket, Father Hart wondered if he too should take some speech lessons from the Ould Sod.

  MICK OF THE WOODS

  The car pitched and rolled on the makeshift sand road like a small boat in a gale. Mick ignored the jolts and kept his foot on the accelerator. Around him were mile on mile of pine and cedar trees. He was deep in his favorite refuge, the 650,000 acres of wilderness that stretch across the narrowed peninsula of South Jersey, from the Atlantic shore almost to the Delaware River. Geographers call them the Pine Barrens, a name that reflects the opinion of their early discoverers. The sandy soil made farming impossible so the land was never cleared. Even the original inhabitants of New Jersey, the Leni-Lenape, shunned the Barrens.

  Ahead of Mick the woods suddenly opened and a house stood in the bright March sunshine. It was not much of a house. Most of it was a porch, with three rocking chairs on it. Behind that was little more than a shack, with two dirty windows staring into the woods. Tufts of grass grew on what might charitably be called a lawn. On the left, water sparkled in acres of cranberry bog. In the center of the yard was an ancient brass water pump. Around it sprawled no less than eight automobiles.

  One, a green and white 1955 Chevrolet V-8, was upside down, its tail fins invisible in the sand. Two other cars were on their sides. One of these was a light blue ’56 Chrysler 300-B with its split grille gone but most of its 4,600-pound body intact. Its 355-horsepower engine, which had won first place in the Daytona High Performance Trials that year, was long gone. Beside it was a 1949 Hudson Hornet step-down chassis car with its famous 7X flathead six engine also long since cannibalized.

  Around them squatted muscle cars of the sixties, upright but with their tires missing, their big bumpers half-buried in the sand. A red Ford with a bubble in the fiberglass hood for the 427 high-riser engine, a white ’66 Pontiac GTO, a blue Mercury Montego, and a bright Orange Judge model Pontiac with wild spoilers and faded decals still in place.

  Parts of all of these cars were in Mick’s white 1970 American Motors Rebel and in the only operating car in the yard, a dark blue Studebaker Hawk GT, with whitewall tires and flaps. Its small, square grille, Thunderbird roofline, and clean flanks made it look as if a piece of Europe, or at least a snooty part of Long Island, had somehow dropped uninvited into this wilderness junkyard.

  Mick got out of his car and strolled onto the porch. Through the open door he saw a man in red flannel underwear standing at a stove, cooking something that crackled in hot grease. He had a spatula in one hand and a raw onion in the other hand. He was in the middle of biting into the onion when he saw Mick. “Jeeesus Christ,” Gamaliel Oxenford said. “Look what the gale blew in. Look what the gale blew in.”

  “Hello, Pops,” Mick said.

  Gamaliel Oxenford stood about five feet ten in his flannel-shod feet. He had solid shoulders and remarkably thick muscular legs. His hair, once blond, had turned as white as a cumulus cloud, but there was not a line in his ruddy, sharp-featured face to reveal that he was eighty-six years old.

  “Want a drink?” the old man said, and without waiting for an answer handed Mick a jug of applejack. Mick took a swallow of the clear, brown fluid. Inside the kitchen, he discovered another man sitting in a chair: Joe Turner. As usual, he sat on the end of his spine with his legs stretched halfway across the room, no expression worth mentioning on his mournful ebony face. He wore a leather hunting shirt that might have belonged to Daniel Boone and homemade canvas trousers.

  Joe was a black marine veteran of the Korean War. He had been born in Camden and hunted in the Pines with his father as a boy. When he came back from Korea, he found his father was dead and his mother had married again. Joe had moved into the Pines, built himself a one-room house about a mile from Oxenford’s, and had rarely emerged from the woods for the past thirty years. He made a living as a guide for hunters—he knew every sand road and dirt track in the wilderness’s thousand square miles—and as a cranberry grower. He had built his own four-acre bog.

  “Hello, Joe,” Mick said.

  Joe said nothing. He seldom had anything to say. That was one of several reasons why Mick found him good company.

  “You seen anything of my next-to-worthless son lately?” Gamaliel Oxenford said.

  “Now and then in the Shamrock,” Mick said.

  The Professor, as Mick and everyone else called Alex Oxenford, had always been easy to talk to, in school and out of it. After Mick came back from Nam, the Professor was one of the few people in town outside Mick’s family who tried to help him, taking him into the Pines to meet Gamaliel (“Pop”) Oxenford and Joe Turner. Toget
her they had worked on these old cars, which Joe and Mick drove on dirt tracks in rural counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Mick had revealed an astonishing aptitude for understanding how an engine worked, almost by divination, it seemed at times. Alex Oxenford had spent hours urging him to do something with this talent, to no avail.

  “I saw a big buck out in the yard last night,” Pop Oxenford said. “He had velvet on his horns. Them horns is soft when he’s in velvet.”

  Mick said nothing. Often there was no need to reply to Pop Oxenford’s comments. That was one reason why Mick liked him. Another reason was the Medal of Honor he had won in the Argonne in 1918. He had the medal framed and hung in the outhouse. He said that was the best place to hang a medal, because they were mostly shit.

  “Want a chop?” Pop Oxenford said.

  “Yeah.”

  Pop went into the next room and came back with another chop, which he threw into the crackling pan. Above the stove on the wall was a framed poem.

  God hath not promised

  Sun without rain

  Joy without sorrow

  Peace without pain.

  Pop took a sip of applejack and flipped the sizzling, sputtering chops. He took another chomp of the onion. “What are they after now?”

  “Nothin’,” Mick said.

  “They always seem to be after somethin’ in Paradise Beach. Remember when they was after the jetport?”

  “Yeah.”

  The year after the bearer bonds had disappeared into the federal treasury, the state was supposed to build a jetport in the Pines. It was going to turn Paradise Beach into another Atlantic City, and Atlantic City into Miami Beach and Las Vegas rolled into one big pile of money. Mick’s grandfather and his uncles had sat around nights figuring out how much they could get for their oceanfront property in Paradise. They were going to be millionaires after all. But something went sour in Trenton. Instead, the legislature voted to keep the Pines forever wild. So here they were in Hog Wallow, population forty-five, one of the bigger towns in the woods.

  Pop Oxenford claimed he was the mayor of Hog Wallow. No one argued with him because he was the oldest resident, as far as anyone knew. No one had elected him either, but no one ever voted for anything in the Pines. They regarded those “outside” as slightly crazy, with their worries over voting, making money, getting married. All the things Mick’s mother and aunts and uncles talked about all the time.

  Maybe he liked the Pineys because they reminded him of the way the Vietnamese were when he first came to Binh Nghai. At least, the way he thought they were. Mick let the Pineys stay the way they were in his head by not getting to know them well, except for Pop Oxenford and Joe Turner. Some people might say Mick did not know Joe well. Mick had probably said no more than a hundred words to him in the past ten years. But in another way, a marine way, Mick knew him very well.

  Oxenford threw the chops onto plates and set them on a rough board table. He handed Mick a baked potato from the oven of the stove and a pitcher of melted grease to pour over it. “I can’t understand why my son don’t get married. When I was his age, I had seven children mustered and grown. Two of them got killed in the wars. Did I tell you that?”

  “Yeah,” Mick said.

  Mick chewed on the crisp pork. It was delicious. His favorite food, these days. Maybe that was why he came over here.

  “Did I show you my new girlfriend? I’ve been meetin’ her every night down by Apple Pie Hill. She enjoys it so much she left me her picture.”

  From a drawer in the table the old man pulled out a picture of an Arab girl wearing a veil and nothing else. “She wears that rag on her face ’cause she’s afraid I’ll brag about her to someone she knows like maybe Mrs. Rockefeller.”

  “Nice,” Mick said.

  “How about you? Gettin’ much?”

  “A little here, a little there.”

  “When I was your age, I kept three women busy. That’s the only way to do it. Otherwise women get involved with you and vice versa. Women like to mix up sex with all sorts of crazy things. I was the best jig dancer in these woods. That got me into a lot of women. I had one who was sixty-four. She was the hottest of them all in bed. But she couldn’t cook worth a damn. I’d puke up the breakfast she fed me every time. I never found a woman who could cook as good as me. I think that’s why my wife died. She died of shame, I really think so. She died of mortification because I was such a better cook.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Why should I lie to you?”

  “What about the air tune?”

  “Oh, that was my fallback. If I couldn’t get nowhere with jig dancing, I’d try the air tune. That was surefire, but you couldn’t overuse it, don’t you understand? You couldn’t overuse it. Women do a lot of talking between themselves. I used to say, if you could stop women talking between themselves, this world’d be a paradise.”

  “If you could just stop them talking, period.”

  “No, I like to hear women talk. They talk the damndest nonsense. It’s entertaining. You got to learn to listen to women. It’s good entertainment, it really is. Did I ever tell you about El and Will Williams?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I laid El many a time before she married Will. That woman was so damn mad at me for not marryin’ her she vowed to get rich. Know how she did it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Three nights runnin’ she and Will had the same dream. It was right after they found Jesus for the thirty-second or thirty-third time. Will was the biggest drunk in Hog Wallow, and El wasn’t far behind him. Anyway they both dreamed there was an iron-handled drawer buried up by Tulpohocken Creek, on the road that goes by Joe Holloway field and comes out at the High Crossing. They went up there on the third morning and dug up a box full of buckskin bags full of gold coins. It went back to pirate days or maybe ’76 when people buried money all over these woods.”

  “What did they do with the money?”

  “Oh, they moved to Atlantic City and became the two biggest drunks there. That was long before they brought in the craps. Where do you think El got that dream?”

  “Search me.”

  “Will told me before they left for Atlantic City, them three nights he heard the air tune. He heard it clear.”

  “Hey. I hope I hear it some one of these days. I’m sick of livin’ on a cop’s salary.”

  “I told you a long time ago a salary’s a bad idea. It eats a hole in your belly.”

  “Feel like a roam, Joe?” Mick asked.

  Joe nodded. Mick thanked Pop Oxenford for lunch and walked through the pines to Joe’s house. There was no furniture in it, except for a table, a kerosene lamp, a sleeping bag, and a huge Bible. Joe took correspondence courses in the Bible. He stayed up nights studying it by the light of the kerosene lamp. The courses had convinced Joe that the world was coming to an end soon. They were in the final days.

  “How’s the bog doin’?” Mick said.

  “Okay,” Joe said.

  They walked to the edge of the bog. Mick had helped him dam and dredge it. They had hauled tree stumps the size of armchairs out of its freezing depths. One of the cranberry companies had given Joe the land. Eventually, when the bog began to make money, Joe hoped to build a bigger house and marry someone. Who that would be, it was hard to say. There were no black women in the Pines, as far as Mick knew.

  They set out along one of the twisting sand roads, two marines going no place in particular. Mick did not know why Joe had moved into the woods. It might have something to do with coming home and finding his mother in bed with a stranger. It might have had something to do with what happened to him in the marines.

  Joe had been in the retreat from the Yalu River in 1950, one of the roughest fights in the history of the Corps. Mick did not know what had happened to him there. He did not want to know.

  Just being with Joe, not knowing, made Mick feel better. He could let the movie of the day he had volunteered for Binh Nghai unreel in
his head as they moved along.

  It was a beautiful day, that morning in Nam. Like this one, here in New Jersey. Mick let the woods absorb his mind for a while. The sun glistened on brooks the color of dark tea, where buried cedars lay. On nearby hills, files of white cedars paraded against the blue sky. Mick knew these woods almost as well as Joe Turner and Pop Oxenford. He knew the stories, the place names. He could hear Pop’s voice, telling him he had planted those pines on the bank of Wading River.

  Look at them big pines. You’d never think I’m as old as them big pines, would you? I seen all of these big pines grow. All around here was cut down for charcoal.

  Mick recognized Dan Dillet’s field, overgrown now with blueberry bushes and scrub oaks, where Dan had made charcoal. The Hocken Lowlands near the creek, where rattlesnakes by the dozen gathered. Bony Hole, where a man named Bony used to water his horse.

  I want volunteers for this job, the colonel had said. Sergeant O’Day had been the first marine to step forward. Some people thought it sounded too hairy, but Mick thought Binh Nghai sounded a lot better than life at the firebase, with the colonel pulling chickenshit inspections and Charlie firing mortars and rockets into your lap at all hours of the day and night. Binh Nghai meant you were on your own, without an officer within ten miles. It meant you could make your own rules, fight your own war.

  Wasn’t that what the Corps wanted us to do? Mick asked Joe Turner in the silence of his mind. He looked across another creek at a red cedar that Pop Oxenford said he had planted. I went to school there, by that red cedar.

  On another day like this they had come to Binh Nghai. They had been dumped out of the truck before the fort, Sergeant O’Day, Corporal Lummis, and ten other marines to live and perhaps die with the five thousand people of this village on the Tra Bong River, near the coast of Quang Tri province.

  The fort looked like something out of a movie of Arizona in Wild West days, with some Vietnamese touches. It had whitewashed brick walls and an inner courtyard. Beyond the outer walls was a moat. It had once been the home and headquarters of the French district chief. Inside they found twenty members of the South Vietnamese Popular Forces, who slept at the fort and only went into the village in daylight. The PFs were all marked men, and if they slept with their wives or girlfriends during the night, the VC murdered them. They had murdered one man in his parents’ house the night before the marines arrived.