Slap Your Sides

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Slap Your Sides Page 9

by M. E. Kerr


  “I keep forgetting.” She was riding Quinn, who was delighted she’d come back and was stepping high because of it.

  “Daddy told me Tommy actually registered for the draft,” she said.

  When Tommy told Mom and Dad the Army wouldn’t take him, Dad had looked at Mom and said, “I bet thee are glad, Mother, hah?” It was meant as sarcasm. He’d begun speaking the plain language to her in this snide way, accompanied by a tiny, mean smile.

  Dad had stopped going to Rotary Tuesdays because there was always a hometown boy on leave or furlough, telling about his experiences in the war. Then there were the fellow Rotarians, who snubbed Dad or asked snide questions about Bud. Don’t tell me your boy still won’t fight?

  “Daddy said it took guts for Tommy to try and join the Army,” Daria continued, “considering the example Bud set.”

  “It takes guts to be 4E too.”

  “I knew you’d say that,” said Daria.

  “Then why bring it up?”

  “I keep hoping you’ll change your mind.”

  In Bud’s last letter he had written that a few more of the COs were changing their minds. They were giving in to pressure from their families, from the war news, and from their consciences, and they were asking for reclassification. They were being reassigned as 1AO, same as Tommy’d hoped to be: noncombatant servicemen.

  I told Daria a little about Bud’s work at the hospital, that he wrote describing the scorn institutions had for patients who were feeble, incontinent, angry, and most often all three.

  Just getting them cleaned, dressed, and ready for breakfast takes until lunch. I come on duty at 7 A.M. and start by putting toothpaste on 50 toothbrushes. Before we rigged up showers here, they would bathe all in the same tub, one by one, not bothering to change the water. There is a big American Indian called Sky Hawk. You should see the size of him! He doesn’t speak but sometimes will howl like a dog, his fists up, ready to punch you. The way they used to discipline him was to tether him to his iron bed minus the mattress, facedown naked, lower a Turkish towel in a bucket of water, then swat him with it. Leave him there all day, crying and soiling himself. All because he did something like steal a piece of toast from someone’s breakfast plate.

  “I want to help people, but I wouldn’t want that job,” Daria said. “It’s thankless, isn’t it?”

  “Bud says those patients haven’t been given the chance to see what they can do. Places like that just give them custodial care.”

  “If that, it sounds like…. Oh, there are things I admire about Bud. But I agree with something Daddy said.”

  “What?”

  “That Bud is putting out the fire in the house across the street when his own house is on fire.”

  I didn’t bother to try and answer that, but I wondered if people in Sweet Creek knew about Mom and Dad. At home Dad was either making snide remarks or acting like Mom wasn’t there. Was he doing it in the store, too?

  Last August, when my buddy Marty Allen and I had joined the volunteers painting the trim on SCFS, there had been a new sign behind glass at the front entrance.

  I WILL LAY DOWN MY LIFE IF NEED BE, BUT I WILL NOT TAKE SOMEONE ELSE’S.

  Kids had written in black crayon on the wall next to it: WHAT ABOUT HITLER’S? MUSSOLINI’S? TOJO’S?

  Daria and I rode along awhile. The land needed rain badly. Even the trees were dusty.

  I announced I’d been reading some poetry.

  “Really? I’m impressed!”

  “And I like it.”

  “Who’re you reading?”

  “His name is Walter Benton!”

  “Oh no.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You’ve been reading This Is My Beloved?”

  “Yeah. I’m halfway through it.”

  “That’s tacky, Jubal.”

  “It’s not tacky.” It was a Natalia Granger recommendation: “Sexy as all get-out!” she’d written across a postcard. She was right.

  “Why don’t you read serious poets?” Daria asked me.

  “Because I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  “But you know what Walter Benton is talking about!” she said.

  “I wish I knew more.”

  She laughed over her shoulder at me, then told Quinn to giddyap.

  I had some trouble heading Tyke in the direction of the stable, and when we got there finally, Quinn was out in the paddock. Daria was waiting for Tyke and me.

  “Now let’s pay some attention to this little fellow,” she said as I got off him. “I bet he belonged to someone. He looks like the kind of horse people get for their kids. Like a Morgan.”

  Together we brushed and curried Tyke. We shampooed him and scrubbed his legs so his stockings turned golden, then shampooed his tail until it was blue-black.

  All the while, Daria crooned to him. “I know what you want, Tyke…. I’m going to take good care of you, Tyke…. Do you hear me?”…I shut my eyes and thought of her saying some of that stuff to me. After, when we turned him out, he pranced and snorted. He sauntered by Quinn as though he were tipping his hat to him.

  We were about to leave when Luke Casper ambled down from the office. Sometimes the way he looked at Daria from head to toe made me want to punch him. He told Daria she was going to “catch it” when she got home.

  “What am I going to catch, Luke?” Daria laughed. “Am I going to catch the chicken pox?”

  “Radio Dan’s having a fit!”

  “Why? He knows I take the horses out.”

  “I’ll bet he doesn’t know you take them out with Jubal.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a sweetheart, Luke!” Daria said.

  “Yeah, thanks, Luke,” I said.

  “I was doing her a favor. I wasn’t doing you one, Jubal.”

  We’d never been buddies. Religion was foreign to him, particularly one like Friends. He didn’t dare make cracks around Mr. Hart, but he’d bait me sometimes about the war. He’d say, “Did you see in the newspapers that your pal Adolf bombed London again?”

  He was 4F because of a hernia.

  There were times, too, when he’d try to get me to drink whiskey with him. Then he’d say, “Okay, don’t drink anything. Just hang out while I drink.” I knew he was really lonely.

  “Your daddy’s called here twice,” he told Daria. “He’s probably got fire coming out of his nose by now!”

  “I bet he has,” Daria said to me as we walked away from Casper. “It’s almost five, Jubal. How could I forget the time this way?”

  “Don’t call Luke ‘sweetheart,’” I said. “He’ll take it the wrong way.”

  “Oh, he’s harmless. I think he looks like Jimmy Cagney. Did you see him in Yankee Doodle Dandy? I love that movie!”

  “I saw him in The Roaring Twenties with Humphrey Bogart…. But don’t kid with Luke,” I said. “You’ll give him ideas. He says you look like his ex.”

  “I wish. She was gorgeous! I like it that you’re protective, Jubal.”

  We headed toward the bus stop, through fields filled with Queen Anne’s lace and ironweed. Barn swallows were swooping in the air, and the haze from the heat was blurring the sight of the Welsh Mountains.

  She was walking ahead of me when she said, “My times with you are the best times, Jubal.”

  “Me, too.”

  “We’re lucky, Jubal…lucky lucky lucky.”

  When I got home, Mom was mixing the white margarine with the yellow food coloring, to make it look like butter.

  “Why don’t you just leave it white?” I asked her.

  “Your father won’t eat it white.”

  “Caesar rules,” I said.

  “What did you say?” Mom looked over at me with this tired expression in her eyes, as though she was just about at the end of her rope.

  “I didn’t say anything. Forget it.”

  “I heard you, Jubal…. I don’t like you showing your father disrespec
t!”

  “What about the way he acts? Sitting downstairs brooding, and when he does come up, he’s got nothing nice to say to us! He mocks you by speaking the plain language to you! He just orders Tommy and me and you around: Do this, do that, no please or thank you!”

  “He needs help. Particularly with heavy work. You know how hard it is for Daddy to ask for help.”

  “Since when can’t he do heavy work? He’s getting a paunch, you know. Maybe he needs more exercise.”

  “No,” Mom said sharply. “That’s not what he needs. He needs to rest.”

  “From what? From his duties as air-raid warden? That’s about all the exercise he gets. How long since he’s been to meeting?”

  He hadn’t been there in months. Tommy and Mom and I rarely missed a Sunday. He stayed down in his cellar retreat, where the only one who ever went to see what he was doing was Mahatma.

  Mom rinsed her hands. She turned around and faced me with an angry look. It matched the spirit of the sudden clap of thunder not too far away. “Daddy’s not well, Jubal! He’s got problems in his body as well as his spirit. Doctor Sincerbeaux called me and told me Daddy’s heart misses beats.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “I know you’re making good money at the Harts’, and I know you’re sending some to Bud,” Mom said. “That’s fine. I’m proud of you. But you have to help here. Before you volunteer to paint that school, you should find out what needs to be done here!”

  A jagged edge of lightning lit up the sky outside. It was the answer to our prayers: a heavy rain starting down.

  I said, “Mom, make a list. Put everything that needs doing on it.”

  “Thanks, Jubal…. Tommy will help too, although he goes to the store right after school every day.”

  “I don’t need Tommy’s help,” I said. “He does enough as it is.”

  She said, “Be patient with Daddy. Today of all days, try to understand what it’s been like for him.”

  “What happened today?”

  “You’ve been at the Harts’. The neighbors have been up and down the block telling everyone.”

  “Telling everyone what, Mom?”

  That was when I found out why Radio Dan had been trying to get in touch with Daria. It was the first I heard that Dean Daniel had been killed in the central Pacific, on one of the Gilbert Islands.

  I remembered when Dean was a junior counselor at Camp Quannacut, how he’d screamed when he saw a daddy longlegs in his sneaker…. And I remembered seeing him hoist his seabag onto his shoulder, and wave good-bye in the Trenton train station, the same night Bud left for his CPS camp.

  SEVENTEEN

  The next afternoon, a Sunday, I carried a macaroni-and-cheese casserole down the street to the Daniels.

  It was received through a crack in the door by Daria’s mother, with no invitation to come inside.

  “Here’s Jubal now!” my mother said into the telephone as I got back home. “Jubal? It’s Darie Daniel.”

  “I’m sorry about Dean,” I said.

  “Thank you very much,” she said, and I knew from her tone of voice she wasn’t alone. “But I wish you would come now and take back this casserole. We aren’t comfortable accepting it, Jubal. We don’t want anything from Bud Shoemaker’s house, particularly now.”

  Mom could hear me, so I just said, “Whatever you say.”

  “The casserole will be on our front porch for you to pick up immediately.”

  There was a click.

  “She’s such a nice girl,” my mother said. “What did she want?”

  “We were going horseback riding later,” I lied. “Naturally she can’t keep the date.”

  I used walking Mahatma as an excuse to retrieve the dish. There was a row of hedges a few doors down, and I emptied the contents into the branches for the birds.

  Back at our house Mom was reading the Bible in the living room. Dad was at the dining-room table, drinking coffee and looking over the Sunday newspapers.

  I washed the casserole dish and hid it under some mixing bowls.

  Then I went back and sat by Dad.

  “Did you see the latest from Orland Gish?” he asked me.

  Orland Gish sometimes took out ads in the Philadelphia newspapers. They’d be full page, and they’d quote pacifists like A. A. Milne, author of the Pooh series for children; Albert Schweitzer; Gandhi; and Henry David Thoreau. Sometimes I’d think thank God for him, because he was a prosperous Mennonite farmer with a lot of land, the kind of man people respected and admired. Not a coconut.

  Dad passed me a full page toward the back of The Philadelphia Compass.

  WAR BULLETINS

  Probably the heaviest casualties since the war began have been on the Russian front, where in the first year of the war 3,500,000 Germans were killed.

  Soviet losses in the first year of the war were estimated between 8,000,000 and 10,000,000 dead; 3,000,000 missing, wounded, or held prisoner.

  Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee told the House of Commons (June 1942) that the total military casualties of the British Empire for the past two years of the war were 48,973 killed; 46,363 wounded; and 8,458 held prisoner.

  25,000 defenders of Bataan killed by Japanese on 65-mile march to prisoners-of-war camp, another 22,000 died in first two months there.

  5,188 Japanese killed (by actual count) in the Tulagi-Guadalcanal campaign.

  DYING TO HEAR MORE?

  Or would you rather hear a saner view of war from Dr. Henry Emerson Fosdick?

  “The first person to vote for a declaration of war should be the first soldiers on the battlefield. It is disturbing to the rational mind when the people who dispatch others to the front stand above the fray.”

  PRAY FOR PEACE

  Dad stayed in the dining room most of the afternoon, rooting for the St. Louis Cardinals with Tommy. They listened to the game on the radio Tommy and I shared.

  I sneaked out and cleaned the garage, #1 on Mom’s task list. I kept thinking about Daria, remembering what she’d said yesterday when we were leaving the Harts’. We’re lucky, Jubal…lucky, lucky, lucky.

  All I could do now was wait, see if she’d come to the farm next Saturday. See if she’d call in the meantime.

  I worked until sundown. When I went back inside, the game was over but Dad was still sitting at the dining-room table, drinking a hot chocolate that Tommy had made for him. Mom was in the living room knitting in that fast, nervous way of hers when something was upsetting her.

  Mr. Hart had just phoned to tell the family that Abel had escaped from prison. There was an all-points bulletin out for him.

  “We were waiting for you before we called Bud.” Tommy handed me a cup of cocoa.

  “I suppose Abel will show up at the farm,” I said.

  Dad said, “That will be the last place he’ll go if there’s anything left of his mind.”

  “They think he went south,” Tommy said. “Back to Florida, maybe.”

  True, I had never taken to Abel. But I hoped he wouldn’t be caught by any southern police. I had an idea they’d go harder on him. Even though every southern writer seemed to be fond of crazies (at Friends School we were just reading Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter), they were their crazies, not crazies from up north who didn’t want to fight in the war.

  EIGHTEEN

  That Christmas was the first year Natalia didn’t come to Pennsylvania with Aunt Lizzie. Natalia had been on a rigid diet, Lizzie told us, but she wanted to keep the reason secret until she could tell us herself.

  I figured she’d finally found a boyfriend; should I try and get Tommy’s favorite socks back?

  Natalia had sent Tommy a tie from Brooks Brothers in New York, and I got two books. One was an old novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, with a paper clip marking one page. The other was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, sans paper clip.

  Lizzie had given me two books, too, both by Ernie Pyle, the Pulitzer Prize war reporter.

  Sunday m
orning we all went off to Friends, except for my father.

  I stood outside the meetinghouse for a while with Tommy. He smoked a Camel with the long cigarette holder Lizzie had bought him for Christmas. She’d found it at Dunhill. She said it was identical to the one President Roosevelt had.

  I was hoping for a glimpse of Daria. She’d be attending St. Peter’s across the street. Already the organ music was thundering through the stained-glass windows, and families were hurrying inside. They always began promptly at nine, while we started gathering in a random way until the room seemed full, and even then sometimes no one spoke for ten or twenty more minutes.

  “Shall I light another Camel?” Tommy asked me. “Or do you think maybe Darie’s already inside?”

  She hadn’t been to the Harts’ since Dean’s death. The only times I saw her were evenings when I’d walk Mahatma down the street. Sometimes she’d be standing by the piano, singing, while her mother played. Sometimes she’d be sitting at the desk in the living room. I’d see the back of her long brown hair. Instead of two blue stars in the window, one was gold now, since Dean had been killed.

  Radio Dan hadn’t done what I thought he would. He hadn’t poured it on, or tried to milk the situation. In a quieter, more solemn tone than usual, he talked about Dean. His love of music. His stamp collection. He mentioned that he’d been an Eagle Scout and a Sea Scout.

  “Now among the honors he received, among the awards, there will be a Medal of Honor. God bless my boy, and God bless you for your cards and letters.”

  Right after word of Dean’s death, I’d spent almost an hour at Sweet Creek Cards and Stationery trying to find the right sympathy card. One was more awful than the other, but the worst showed a figure disappearing into some clouds, with the line under it advising, “He is not dead—he is just away….” He’s both, I thought.

  I finally bought a card with nothing more on the front than a gold cross. Inside it, I wrote:

  I’m sorry about Dean, Daria. Please call.

  Love from Jubal

 

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