by M. E. Kerr
“Oh, Jubal! What a good surprise to see you here!”
“Yeah. It is a good surprise.”
“What are you doing in the big city?”
“I’m visiting Bud.”
“Bud’s here too?”
“He’s still with CPS, and still on Welfare Island. He’s coming in for lunch.”
“How long has it been since we’ve seen each other, Jubal?”
“Search me,” I said. A century. A millennium. I tried to look into her eyes, but she glanced at mine only a second.
“I’m sorry about your father,” she said.
“His heart was real bad.”
My dad had died four months earlier, the day after President Roosevelt did. He fell over in our kitchen, raging against Truman—against the idea of someone like himself, “a haberdasher,” running the country in the middle of a war.
I’d find myself saying his heart was bad whenever anyone gave me condolences. I think I was pretending that it was just his heart, and not any aggravation I’d caused him.
“Thanks for your sympathy card, Daria.” She’d picked out that tacky card that said someone wasn’t dead, someone was just away. But she’d written underneath the verse,
I will never, ever forget you, ever!
Those seven words stayed with me. I’d tell myself she didn’t have to write that.
“Tell Bud hello,” she said.
“I will. Is Daniel home yet?”
“That’s why I’m on my way to Sweet Creek. Dan’s finally on leave.”
She put her suitcase down a moment and took off the yellow sailor hat she was wearing. She’d let her brown hair grow past her shoulders.
“How do you like boarding school?” I deliberately didn’t say Farleigh Hall because I didn’t want to give her the impression I was keeping track of her.
“Fine, and I’m back at Camp Rainbow this summer.”
“Can you ride there? Do they have horses?”
“I can, and I do…but it’s not the same.”
“Nothing is,” I said.
“No, nothing is, really. “
I wasn’t walking Mahatma by her house and trying to see in her windows anymore, times I knew she was probably home on vacation. I wasn’t even asking about her, but I’d listen around and I’d hear. I’d known she was at the camp for kids with polio for the third summer. I knew Farleigh Hall was near Princeton, New Jersey.
I wrote down where she was on the back of my calendar.
My calendar had a record of my public service, stuff I had to do instead of serving time. Pick up trash at Chester Park weekend mornings, and some nights I sat at court to check in drunks, wife beaters, and teenage roughnecks. Every day after school I cleaned the latrines at City Hall.
I never went to the Harts’ again.
Mr. Hart called personally to tell me he knew his son’s death was an accident. He bore no grudge, he told me, and I was welcome, either to work or visit. But I couldn’t go there, not even to see Tyke. Luke wasn’t over there anymore either. He’d left for a job in Cumberland County.
Daria had on a yellow cotton dress, and those high heels called spectators. It was the pumps that made her seem taller than I was. I remembered when I used to worry that I was short.
“I’m glad I left Sweet Creek,” she said.
“I didn’t know you were that unhappy there.”
“I wasn’t, up until the trouble,” she said. “Now I can’t stand it! I hated what the newspaper wrote about us, as though we were an item.”
I tried to remember if I had ever believed the same thing, or if she had always let it be known that she didn’t feel that way about me.
“Your father made it clear it was all one-sided,” I said. “He didn’t waste any time shipping you off to school, either.”
“I think he really believed he was getting me out of harm’s way, you know what I mean?”
“I guess.”
“I don’t mean you in particular.”
“I know.”
“I’ve never in my life been so scared as I was that day Abel jumped out at me!…Thank God for you, Jubal! I know I never thanked you.”
“That’s okay.”
She gave a defeated little laugh and put her hat back on.
“How’s Tommy?” she asked.
“He’s fine. He and Rose and the baby have been living with us since Dad died.”
“I heard. They were real brave to just stay in Sweet Creek and not give a hoot what anyone said!”
“They gave a hoot. Particularly Rose. But I don’t think they had much choice, Daria.”
She was frowning and still avoiding my eyes. I think she felt obligated to say something, to somehow make more of this chance meeting.
I said, “I’m late, so—”
She looked relieved. “So…so long, Jubal.” She touched the sleeve of my pinstripe seersucker suit with her long fingers.
“So long,” I said.
I didn’t wait and watch her walk away.
I asked for directions to Grand Central Terminal, and I rode the subway with my heart pounding.
Someday, I believed, she wouldn’t have that effect on me. But our lives would always be linked, no matter what became of me.
If it had been Luke Casper menacing Daria, and if it had been Luke Casper I had killed, I would surely have stood trial. I probably would have served time for manslaughter.
But it was a relief to almost everyone that Abel had been destroyed, whether it was willful on my part or the accident it had been.
I’d pleaded guilty before a judge who was later one of my father’s pallbearers. A fellow Rotarian. He was a friend of Radio Dan’s. I always believed he’d been instructed by Daria’s father to include staying away from her as part of my punishment.
“Do you have anything to say for yourself, Jubal Shoemaker?” he’d asked.
“All my life I’ll wish I could take back the day I killed Abel Hart,” I said.
“What about if he really had been about to do harm to Miss Daniel?”
“Could I have stopped him without killing him? I think so, but I didn’t try.”
Before I’d crushed Abel’s spine with the pitchfork, I’d heard the bone crack, heard him yelp like some miserable, abused street dog. He was too weak and defeated to make a louder noise.
“Don’t keep talking about it, Jubal,” Bud said. I’d met him across the street from Grand Central Terminal, in a large restaurant called Longchamps. “Don’t beat yourself up about it.”
“I hardly ever talk about it,” I said. “It’s just that we’ve never really discussed it.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“You know that I never meant to kill him! I couldn’t even see him in the dark! I thought it was Luke!”
“I know, Jube.”
“I grabbed that pitchfork to threaten Luke, to make him stop whatever he was doing to Daria! I thought Luke was drunk. I didn’t intend to kill anyone.”
“It’s hard for you because you never liked Abel.”
“And people are talking about that, too. I know they are.”
There were even kids at SCFS who thought that I wouldn’t have been able to kill just anyone…that I must have hated Abel…and there were those who could remember I’d called him names and made fun of him. No one had ever heard me speak against Luke. No one knew anything about Daria and me or that I resented the way Luke behaved around her.
Bud said, “People in Sweet Creek aren’t talking about you. You did them a favor! Abel’s out of sight, out of mind. If they had their way, we’d all be out of sight permanently. Not just for the duration.”
He took his hearing aid out of his ear and tapped it against the table. Hope had told Mom that he was always imagining there was something wrong with the equipment, but the truth was, he was getting deafer.
Bud still didn’t care what he wore. He looked like he’d grabbed what he had on from that bin down at the soup kitchen. His jacket sleeves ended way ab
ove his wrists, and the collar of his sport shirt was frayed. Plus he looked like something out of a concentration camp. The experiment was over, but he was having trouble gaining the weight back, because he’d become a vegetarian.
Lizzie’d started calling him Saint Bud. She’d make the sign of the cross when she’d say his name.
At Longchamps I ate chicken chow mein while he had a Welsh rarebit. He showed me some pictures of Hope. She’d written me to say Abel never would have survived, anyway. His mind was gone.
It should have helped to be told that, but it didn’t stop me from hearing the crack of that bone, and the high little cry from Abel’s throat. It didn’t stop me from knowing that with one thrust I’d killed someone as defenseless as a frightened animal.
I had photographs, too, at lunch that day.
I passed them to Bud one by one.
“It’s hard to look at family photos and not see Dad,” he said.
Dad scowling, I thought to myself, but I didn’t say it. Between the two of us we had probably hastened Dad’s death. But Bud had never seen him near the end, when he’d forgotten how to smile, when he sulked down in the cellar—the hell with Mom, the hell with us all.
“This is all we need, Jubal!” Dad had declared when the police brought me home from the Harts’ that day.
What none of our family had foreseen was the feeling of relief in the community. It was easier to understand someone who’d kill than it was to understand someone who wouldn’t. The Shoemakers were just like everyone else after all. Bud was a maverick, an embarrassment, and because of Bud our business still suffered. But my mother got letters from people in Sweet Creek who wanted her to know they understood what she was going through because of what I’d done. And my father took a perverse glee in the idea of my devout mother suffering this homicide in the family. There was a new spring to his step, and he was snide and smug.
Bud passed the photos back to me.
“Poor Tommy,” he said. “He still tries to dress like Fast Tom, doesn’t he? Lookit that white jacket with the navy pants!”
“Rose spoils him,” I said. “She buys him clothes. She’s on the night shift at Wride’s now, and she makes more than Tommy does. But he comes home to have lunch with her and Garten everyday.”
“Garten Shoemaker. That’s quite a moniker for a little guy.”
“It’s her maiden name.”
“I know…. What’s she like?”
“Lizzie says there’s just one word for Rose. Pleasant.”
“Lizzie likes to nail everyone, doesn’t she?” Bud took a Camel from his pack and lit it. He said, “How’s the store doing?”
“Thanks to Radio Dan, we’re almost back to normal. He plugs Winnie’s Weekly Winner. It was his idea for Mom to feature something every week.”
“What about his daughter?”
I wasn’t going to tell him we’d just run into each other at Penn Station. I didn’t want Bud to pick at it. I doubted I’d tell anyone.
I said, “She’s around.”
“Are you still hung up on her?”
“I got over that.”
“Because if you’re going to witness, it helps to have a girl who’s supportive.”
“Yeah…but don’t you think the war’s winding down?”
“Like it was winding down at the end of All Quiet on the Western Front?” Bud gave me one of his sardonic smiles. “How many people will be killed, do you think, while the war’s winding down?”
The same day I arrived back in Sweet Creek, an American B-29 bomber, Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima, a port on Japan’s eastern coast. The bomb was called Little Boy, and the haberdasher running the country in the middle of a war pronounced it “the greatest thing in history!”
Three days later a second bomb, named Fat Man, was dropped on one of Japan’s innermost cities, Nagasaki.
Bud was right to wonder how many people would be killed before the war wound down. Some 210,000 Japanese were known to be dead just because of Little Boy and Fat Man.
That fall our teachers at SCFS talked of a whole new concept of war in which fighting men would never be needed in such numbers again…in which there would be no draft. What would become of protests against war, when the means to wage it had been so profoundly changed? We had many debates. And when peace came, we had plans. A majority of our seniors signed up with the American Friends Service Committee, to do relief work in Europe before going on to college. I was one of them.
Soon after the Japanese surrendered unconditionally aboard the USS Missouri, in Tokyo Bay, Radio Dan made an announcement.
Listeners, this is your old home-front pal Radio Dan. I’m moving on now. They say in the Bible there’s a time to reap and a time to sow and so forth and so on, and I’m adding my thought that there’s a time to move on.
I’ve been invited to have a little show up in the Finger Lakes, in a peaceful little hamlet called Auburn, New York.
My wife, and Darie, and my son, Daniel, went there with me for a look see, and we liked what we saw. I think Darie and Daniel like the idea of the illustrious Cornell University being right nearby…“Far above Cayuga’s waters.”…Oh, yes.
Now our wonderful sponsors, the Wrides, are closing their plant. No more K-rations (do I hear a cheer from the troops at that news?), so no more onions. Breathe a sigh of relief. Or just breathe, period.
The Wrides will be back with Wride Palace, where you’ll be able to skate, bowl, dance, and enjoy yourselves, you and your civilian and servicemen husbands, boyfriends, fathers…and I’m not forgetting there were some service women, too. Come to Wride Palace, ladies, and have a drink on them!
Thanks for a wonderful war, listeners. I wish you peace, as my daughter Darie would say: I will never, ever forget you, ever!
Here she is, folks, for the last time.
If our bombs stopped the killing,
clap your hands!
If V-J Day was thrilling,
clap your hands,
If you’re glad we won the war,
glad they won’t be back for more,
Slap your sides,
Thank you, Wrides,
Clap your hands.
I never saw Daria again.
About the Author
M. E. KERR is a winner of the American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the 2000 ALAN award from the National Council of Teachers of English. She lives in East Hampton, New York, and remembers clearly the hometown boy who chose not to fight when all the other young men, including her brother, were marching off to war. Her web site is: www.mekerr.com
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BOOKS BY M. E. KERR
WHAT BECAME OF HER
2001 Books for the Teen Age (New York Public Library)
BLOOD ON THE FOREHEAD: WHAT I KNOW ABOUT WRITING
1999 Books for the Teen Age (New York Public Library)
“HELLO,” I LIED
1998 Books for the Teen Age (New York Public Library)
DELIVER US FROM EVIE
1995 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)
1995 Recommended Books for Reluctant Young Adult Readers (ALA)
1995 Fanfare Honor List (The Horn Book)
1995 Books for the Teen Age (New York Public Library)
1994 School Library Journal Best Books of the Year
1994 Booklist Books for Youth Editors’ Choices
1994 Best Books Honor (Michigan Library Association)
LINGER
1994 Books for the Teen Age (New York Public Library)
FELL DOWN
1991 Booklist Books for Youth Editors’ Choices
1992 Books for the Teen Age (New York Public Library)
FELL BACK
1990 Edgar Allan Poe Award Finalist (Mystery Writers of America)
1990 Books for the Teen Age (New York Public Library)
FELL
&nbs
p; 1987 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)
1987 Booklist Books for Youth Editors’ Choice
1988 Books for the Teen Age (New York Public Library)
NIGHT KITES
1991 California Young Reader Medal
Best of the Best Books (YA) 1966–1986 (ALA)
1987 Recommended Books for Reluctant Young Adult Readers (ALA)
Booklist’s Best of the ’80s
LITTLE LITTLE
1981 School Library Journal Best Books of the Year
1981 Golden Kite Award (SCBWI)
1982 Books for the Teen Age (New York Public Library)
GENTLEHANDS
Best of the Best Books (YA) 1966–1992 (ALA)
1978 School Library Journal Best Books of the Year 1978 Christopher Award
1978 Outstanding Children’s Books of the Year (The New York Times)
1979 Books for the Teen Age (New York Public Library)
IF I LOVE YOU, AM I TRAPPED FOREVER?
1973 Outstanding Children’s Books of the Year (The New York Times)
1973 Child Study Association’s Children’s Book of the Year
1973 Book World’s Children’s Spring Book Festival Honor Book
DINKY HOCKER SHOOTS SMACK!
Best of the Best Books (YA) 1970–1983 (ALA)
1972 Notable Children’s Books (ALA)
1972 School Library Journal
Best Books of the Year Best Children’s Books of 1972 (Library of Congress)
Copyright
SLAP YOUR SIDES. Copyright © 2001 by M. E. Kerr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.