Slap Your Sides

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Slap Your Sides Page 3

by M. E. Kerr


  The morning’s silence seemed heavy to me, probably because I dreaded the idea Hope could be announcing a coming marriage to Bud. Usually couples appeared together to say their intentions, but if one was away, as Bud was, it could be done by the other.

  Hope had brought Abel with her. She sat with Mom and Natalia in the women’s section, opposite us males. Friends who weren’t looking Hope over were staring at Abel. He had fire-red hair, brown—almost black—eyes, and pale white skin. He wasn’t what you’d call fat, but he was tall and chunky, with the kind of build a football halfback might have. Abel almost never smiled. He was always biting his lips, or blinking, as though he didn’t have all his marbles. He had a reputation for being a crusader, protesting when factories hired scabs, picketing The Palace and The Strand in Sweet Creek because they made Negroes sit upstairs.

  I was eager for Hope to make her move. There was no minister, of course. We didn’t recognize one person having authority over another. We didn’t have stained-glass windows or candlelight or incense. Friends got up when the spirit moved them. I’d been in meetings when no one spoke. To me they were the most boring. I’d also been in meetings when someone went on and on and made no sense. You had to sit there and listen. If you closed your eyes, you could be accused of sleeping.

  Soon Hope was on her feet. She was pushing back a strand of her long auburn hair, which never stayed back. She was waiting until she had everyone’s attention.

  “Friends,” she began, “you may have seen me at your meeting before. I’m a member of the Doylestown meeting, but I came here several times with Efram Shoemaker, known to all of you as Bud.

  “As many of you know, he’s now in a Civilian Public Service camp in Colorado. Some people say well, why didn’t he just register as a 1AO and serve as a noncombatant?…Some people ask that. Most Quakers know the answer. If you load the bullet in the gun, or shoot the gun, or carry away the one shot by a gun, you are at war. If you join the military and do little more than paperwork in some office down in Richmond, Virginia, you are at war…. Bud chose to be a witness against this war, against war of any kind, for any reason!”

  I could see many Friends nodding their heads in agreement with Hope.

  “As a 4E conscientious objector he will perform work of national importance, unconnected with the war, serving without pay, in whatever capacity he is assigned, for however long is necessary.”

  Hope pushed that same strand of hair back.

  Across from her, Abel had this dizzy little smile on his face. He often looked as though he heard voices or was under some kind of spell. Even when a new horse arrived on the Hart farm, it was wary of him, would pull away or squeal when he tried to handle it. Horses always know if you’re strange.

  “I am asking for your prayers,” Hope continued, “to keep Bud strong and confident. But I am also here to thank you. I believe a lot of the credit for Bud’s peace testimony can go to you and this meetinghouse.

  “Thank you. God bless you.”

  Natalia clapped, and heads turned to see who was rude enough to applaud.

  Lizzie bent down and said something to her about it.

  Slim Hislop waited another fifteen minutes to get up. He had been the caretaker of the meetinghouse for years, until his knees went on him. He said he’d known Bud since he was a little kid and even then Bud had been special. He elaborated: Bud gave his toys to the flood relief one spring, “and I mean his toys, all of them,” on and on through Bud becoming an Eagle Scout, up to the day Bud filled out Form 47. He returned it to the draft board, writing that the dictates of his personal conscience forbade him to participate in war, in any form, because he believed man was destined to increase and improve, not to decrease and destroy.

  I felt tears behind my eyes. I wished Bud was there to hear someone finally saying something good about him. I was glad for the Sweet Creek meeting, for the Friends there, for the company of other people who appreciated what Bud stood for.

  Suddenly Aunt Lizzie was on her feet. The fur cape had dropped to the highly polished plain wooden floor. Lizzie stood there in her dark-green Peck & Peck suit with the white silk blouse and the sprig of holly in her lapel. Her blond hair was pulled back in a chignon. I knew probably no one approved of her makeup or her brightly colored clothes, but I believed as Dad did: It didn’t hurt. Who did it hurt? I think I even liked it. The Sweet Creek meetinghouse could use a little glamour. I was surprised that Lizzie was going to say something; amazed, really. Yet I’d always suspected Bud was her favorite.

  “Friends, I know you welcome anyone who wants to speak, and I feel obliged to.

  “As a young girl I came to this meeting, and this morning when my sister, Winifred Shoemaker, asked me to join the family here, I did not want to do it. I’ll tell you that right up front. I could have gone to the Presbyterian Church and been happy singing the old Christian hymns without my conscience waking up. I could have said my prayers to keep my nephew, Bud Shoemaker, safe and well, and that would have been that.”

  I couldn’t help smiling a litttle. She had everybody’s attention, even Abel’s. Lizzie always made an impression.

  “Friends, I once considered myself a Quaker. This was my home meeting, as some of you know. But then I fell in love and ‘married out.’ I am married to a man who is Jewish. Over the twenty years of our marriage I have come to know his relatives and many of his friends. We are lucky to be living in America, and if we were not, my husband, and his relatives and friends, would be in concentration camps at best. More likely they’d be dead.

  “As Christian people aren’t you concerned about the mass murder in Europe? Don’t you listen to the news? Don’t you know what’s going on over there? Haven’t you heard of Adolf Hitler? How can you expect other people to risk their lives in a war that affects every single one of us?

  “Friends, I have to speak up and oppose this praise for a conchie, even though he is my own blood. I may love Bud Shoemaker, but I don’t admire him any longer. How can I if he won’t pull his weight in this war? How can you be pacifists with a madman like Hitler ready to rule the world? I want to say to you all, Wake up!

  “Thank you.”

  FIVE

  We headed away from the meetinghouse in silence. There was a strong odor of onions in the air, coming from Wride Foods. Before the war they made mayonnaise and potato salad, but the government stepped in and changed their entire operation. Now they dehydrated onions for K rations.

  They were Radio Dan’s sponsor.

  Tommy had listened to the program for a few days, to see if Bud would be mentioned during one of Radio Dan’s meandering musings. Dan would say whatever popped into his head, but according to Tommy the power of Rotary prevailed. Radio Dan wasn’t going to go after the son of a fellow Rotarian.

  My father always made a stop at his store on the way back from meeting. He would get out and check that the doors were locked. Because he had locked them himself on Saturday night, he never found them unlocked. That did not stop him.

  “Please hurry, Efram,” Lizzie said. “I have to go to the little girls’ room.”

  “You can use the facilities at the store.” Those were the first words he’d spoken to Lizzie since we’d all come out of meeting.

  “Never mind, I’ll wait.”

  “Suit yourself, Lizzie,” he said from the driver’s seat, and then in an aside he said quietly, “You always do.”

  “No, I do not always suit myself, Efram Shoemaker! I come here every single year to spend the holidays with my sister, since she won’t leave you alone at Christmas, and you can’t leave that department store of yours!”

  “So that was what that was all about, back at the meetinghouse!” asked my father. “Getting even?”

  “Maybe if you ever listened to the news, you’d know what it was all about!”

  “I read the newspapers. That’s enough.”

  My mother edged into the conversation. “It’s just too bad that what you had to say came on top of what Hop
e had to say.”

  “What Hope said was half the reason I had to get up!” Lizzie said.

  “This isn’t a war about the Jews!” my father said. “It’s a war about German expansionism!”

  “Those are just words, Efram! The Jews are being killed!”

  “They’re not the only ones.”

  Mom said, “Can we please not talk about the war?”

  “I’m so hungry I could eat a bear!” Natalia complained.

  My mother made the suggestion to my father that we drive straight home.

  “We’re two seconds away,” he said.

  “You know the doors are locked, Ef.”

  “It might be this very morning they’re not, Winnie.”

  He was already pulling into a parking space in front of the store.

  I was the first to speak. “Someone soaped the windows.”

  My father had the Buick’s door open, but he just sat there looking at what was written in soap.

  “Oh, Efram,” said my mother softly.

  “What does it say?” Natalia asked.

  Everyone was still a moment while they read:

  YOUR SON IS A SLACKER

  SIX

  The window soaping had punched the breath out of Dad. He’d said it was “disheartening,” and all that Sunday I could see his eyes close to tears. He knew people in Sweet Creek disapproved of Bud’s choosing to be a CO, but I don’t think he ever expected anyone to slander Bud right there on our store windows, some unknown someone, like a thief in the night.

  Next day, just as Lizzie and Natalia were leaving, my father cleared his throat the way someone has of doing it even though nothing’s there. He was working himself up to saying, “Lizzie, I don’t intend to write Bud about your little speech at the meeting, and I hope that you won’t write Bud about the soaping of my store windows. I don’t like to worry him.”

  “I already wrote him about both things,” Tommy piped up. “Bud wants to know what’s going on here. He doesn’t want to be spared.”

  “You wrote him already?”

  “I write him every day…. I mailed it this morning.”

  “Then that’s that,” said my father.

  “I would never have written Bud about your windows,” Lizzie said. “Did I say anything about it when we talked with him on the phone?”

  “You didn’t have a chance,” Natalia said. She had a pair of Tommy’s socks in her suitcase. I’d let her take them. That would have made Bud smile, anyone wanting Tommy’s stuff for a souvenir, but I didn’t dare write him about it. I wasn’t sure Bud wouldn’t tell Tommy. There was something mysterious going on suddenly between Tommy and Bud.

  When Bud called that afternoon, we all took turns. He called three days after Christmas because most servicemen were calling home for the holidays, or trying to. He felt obliged to give them priority. He was keeping his call short for the same reason.

  He said what he’d been saying in letters: that he liked the other guys, that it was beautiful where he was, that he was becoming an expert at wood chopping. Then he thanked Lizzie for the Schrafft’s candy, and when it came my turn, he made slurping noises and said, “Here’s a big sloppy kiss, little bro.” Bud and Tommy used to gang up on me and give me these icky dog kisses with their tongues.

  The family had already received two letters from Bud, but there had also been a third, addressed to Tommy. On the front and back of the envelope PERSONAL was printed out in block letters and underlined.

  No one had asked Tommy about it.

  My folks must have felt it wasn’t their business: It was something between brothers. But I felt left out. I was afraid if I opened my big mouth, Tommy would tell me to buzz off.

  “Honey, I hope the cat’s better when you get home,” said my mother, hugging Aunt Lizzie.

  “Thanks, sis.”

  Uncle Mike had called the night before to say he’d come home to find one of Freud’s eyes closed and bloody.

  Natalia said, “I wish I had all the money Freud has cost us at the vet. I’d be rich.”

  “It’s Shakespeare’s fault. He pounces on poor Freud the moment Freud falls fast asleep,” said Lizzie.

  We stood around in the doorway saying good-bye. They had stayed just three nights. Dad had come home early from the store for Bud’s call, and to bid them farewell.

  I had plans for when they left. I was going to find that letter Bud had sent to Tommy. Mom and Dad would take Mahatma for a walk before it got dark. He was heart-broken, hanging out under Bud’s bed or sitting by the door, expecting him to come through it any minute.

  Tommy was catching the bus to visit Lillie Light, probably hoping he could reach 40 on her graph. Before he left, he held his arms out and spun around, showing off his new topcoat and hat. They were Lizzie’s Christmas presents from Natalia and her. She said maybe certain Quakers didn’t believe in featuring December twenty-fifth over any other day, but she wasn’t a Quaker anymore. She came laden down with gifts.

  She knew that Tommy and I always wore Bud’s hand-me-downs. Her gifts to me were both war stories: Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck. I loved to read, the same way Tommy loved to draw. I didn’t care much about clothes.

  Tommy did. He took after Dad that way. Dad claimed that he represented E. F. Shoemaker Company and was obliged to look his best. But Dad spent more money on clothes than Mom did, and he worked out at the YMCA three nights a week. Watching him put the finishing touches on what he was wearing, in front of a mirror, never left any doubt that Dad was a little stuck on himself.

  I think Tommy knew, too, that he was getting this great face. As much as we all looked alike, put some cheekbones here, and move the eyes there, and the differences were startling when it came to Tommy.

  I knew it when I thought about it, and when my cousin wanted his socks for souvenirs, but living every day with him, I didn’t pay that much attention.

  “What do you think of me?” he said.

  He had on this herringbone tweed coat, and a soft brown fedora with a small red feather in the hatband.

  “You look sharp.”

  “Do I?” He was smiling and still twirling around, his eye catching himself in the mirror across the parlor.

  “You got handsome,” I said.

  “No, I didn’t!” He blushed. “It’s just the clothes Lizzie got me.”

  He left the house with this big grin, and I waited until he was out of sight.

  On Tommy’s desk was one of the new paperback books Judge Edward Whipple had donated to every boy in the junior and senior classes at Sweet Creek High. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane.

  I’d read it last summer. I’d never forget the first sentence. It sent chills down my spine.

  The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

  But at Friends School we’d laughed about the fact that Crane had never been to war. Only somebody who’d never been shot at would think of a wound as a “red badge of courage.” Besides, he’d bragged that he’d written the book in just “ten nights.”

  My family knew the Whipples very well. My father said one of the reasons the draft board hadn’t given Bud that hard a time about his choice to be classified 4E was because the judge knew him and never doubted his sincerity.

  Shortly after Judge Whipple presented all those books to SCHS, a Lancaster Mennonite named Gish, along with Lillie Light’s father, arranged a showing of the movie All Quiet on the Western Front. School kids were bussed to see it. Lew Ayres, the movie star who played the lead, became a CO years after he made that picture. That was right after Pearl Harbor, before Sweet Creekers were really involved in the war. It was before Radio Dan had begun calling himself The Home Front Man. Up until then he’d just been a disc jockey, and he’d called his program “Clap Your Hands.”

  I found the letter I was looking for in Tommy’s lower desk drawer.

  Dear Tommy,


  We went out to do some caroling before Christmas. There were six of us, five Catholics and Quaker Bud. Thanks to you, I knew the words to almost all the carols. Remember how you’d play them at Christmas and Mom would forget she didn’t feature Christmas and hum them?

  We’d decided to serenade the houses up on the ridge, about eight of them, mostly poor families with kids, we’d been told. We did it for the kids, really.

  It was bitter cold and snowing a little. Porch lights went on, and we could see people looking out the windows. We were carrying small candles in paper cups.

  At one house they blinked the lights when we were done as though they were saying thanks. And at another, a woman opened the door a crack and called out, “Merry Christmas!”

  At the third house a man came out on the porch in boots and a leather jacket, and he shouted while we were singing, “Where you boys from?” We just kept on singing, so he came down the porch steps, and we saw he was carrying a pistol.

  “I said where you boys from?”

  My buddy, Cal, said we’d better get out of there fast, so we called “Merry Christmas!” over our shoulders. But he was hollering that he knew where we were from and he’d like to kill us! Then he began firing the pistol.

  We beat it, and thank God he didn’t chase after us, but by the time we got down to the next house, there were a man and woman in the doorway telling us, “Go away! We don’t want your kind on our property!” Same kind of thing at the next house, so guess who probably telephoned them we were coming. More vile names for us as we kept going, and one guy came out carrying a baseball bat, promising to bust open our skulls.

  Tommy, I’m not telling you this for sympathy. It was our own fault for not knowing better. In the hills here, outside Saw Hill, we almost forgot how people feel, but we are learning.

  I want you to know the truth so you will discourage Mom from coming out here to spend her birthday with me. I know that’s what she says she wants, but it’s not a good idea. When I make my holiday call, none of this will be said, but you have to know that everyone here in Saw Hill knows, when strangers come, they’re here to see us, and it isn’t pleasant for them. For the same reason don’t bother sending any packages. I’m telling Mom that we’re forbidden to receive them, but the reason is that somehow by the time they get up here to us, most are empty or damaged. I got an empty Schrafft’s candy box, probably from Lizzie and Mike. Don’t tell Lizzie any of this. Don’t even tell Jubal, because why make him worry? Now that I’m gone, you’re the man of the family, Tommy, and the other thing is that I want you to know what to expect when it comes your time.

 

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