by Lee Server
He always liked to stay ahead a few dollars, but sometimes he found himself down to his last nickel, and sometimes he found himself without a cent to his name. He would roll into a new town, hungry, and hope to find a breadline with a free meal; or he would roam a neighborhood and knock on back doors and ask if they could spare some food, usually offering to do chores in exchange. If a man was home, he usually found something for you to do, like chop some firewood or wash his car; if it was just the housewife, she seldom asked for anything but that you complimented her cooking, which he always did. In some places the bums who came before you left coded chalk marks or scratches on the curb or the fence post telling you which houses were generous and which ones to avoid at all cost. Sometimes he panhandled on the streets, but that was likely to bring on the fuzz anywhere but in the big cities. Sometimes when he was really starving and had no place to go, he would turn himself in to the local police station, say he was making his way back home and had no place to sleep. If they had any sympathy, the cops would put you in a cell overnight, give you some of their grub, and in the morning make you sweep up the jailhouse for your keep.
He took jobs when they presented themselves. He was a dishwasher in Ohio, a fruit picker in Georgia, a ditchdigger someplace else. He always said he was older than he was when asked, and nobody ever asked for any proof. In Pennsylvania he landed in an old coal town in the hills and was taken in by a sweet, middle-aged widow lady. She gave him a room and food and told him she would find some good honest work for him and sent him to the local coal mine where her brother gave him a job. “I went down into the pit with a sledge hammer,” Mitchum recalled, “and took one look around that cramped hole and almost went out of my mind. Claustrophobia. The only thing that kept me down there was a 250 pound Polish foreman who waved a twenty pound hammer at my head and said, ‘You no quit!’ So I no quit. But I was so sick I couldn’t eat. . . . At night I’d just stand around on the street and watch the miners making passes at the girls. I lasted long enough to pay the lady who was so nice to me and then I cut out again.”
The drifter’s world into which he had thrown himself was dangerous and unforgiving. An al fresco ride on a train was fraught with peril. You could easily be set on fire or have your eyes burned out by live cinders blowing back from the engine. The train might hit a steep downhill pass so fast that you would be tossed off like a rag doll, or the freight you were sitting on in a gondola could shift suddenly and slide you out into space, or sitting in an open boxcar with legs dangling out the way many kids liked to do could leave you with your limbs ripped open by a signal post or crushed by the sudden entrance into a narrow tunnel. Many people, especially the young ones, routinely fell under the wheels while trying to board a train or fell to their deaths moving between moving cars or walking a roof walk. If the train itself didn’t kill or maim you, the employees of the railroad made a try at it. There were conductors and railway bulls who took their oath of office so seriously or had such a mean streak that they would do anything they could, including murder, to keep the bums from riding. In the jungles, ‘boes were always updating each other on what yards and what trains to avoid because of tough security or a sadist wielding a monkey wrench or a hammer.
Catch a safe ride and avoid the vicious railroad workers and there were always your fellow bums to worry about. Most hoboes were ordinary decent people down on their luck, but infesting their ranks were many predators—thieves and rapists and psychos—and even the ordinary joes could turn vicious when things became bad enough. There were people riding the rails who would stab you to death for two nickels you kept in your shoe. In the dark of a boxcar at night while people tried to sleep, there was always somebody slipping up to try and pick a pocket or steal a bindle. And if they weren’t after your goods they were trying for a feel of your privates. These things often led to a scuffle, somebody pulling a shiv and somebody else leaking blood. Once Robert saw a fight in a rolling open box that resolved itself with one man shoving the other out of the car and the guy falling splat on his head on a cement wall.
Everywhere he went, Mitchum saw terrible evidence of what desperation and hopelessness could do to human beings. Suicides were common around hobo jungles and rail yards. One time he followed a crowd to see them taking down a man who’d hung himself underneath a rail overpass. Another time a man riding in a boxcar with him slit his wrists during the night. Mitchum saw, too, the things people did to keep living: the young boys who took it up the ass for a cup of food, the man in a jungle in Kentucky prostituting his daughter for ten cents a throw, a blanket spread out on the dirt, forty or fifty men lined up, the girl no more than twelve.
As the numbers of the wandering disenfranchised increased with each year of the Depression, many communities across the country began to take measures against them. Police and sheriff’s departments and private security posses increased in number, given a mandate to make shiftless visitors unwelcome. One time Mitchum remembered coming into a depot with a trainload of hoboes and being met by a vigilante group armed with shotguns and pitchforks, making sure no one on that freight set foot in their town.
“Mother would get letters from Bob,” said Annette Mitchum. “He would tell her how he was doing, when he might be coming back their way for a visit. He would tell her where she could reach him next, and she would try to put a few dollars aside for him and send it to that town, and he could go there and get it when he arrived. And Robert had asked her to send it to him in Savannah, Georgia. He was going there to pick up his money when they arrested him.”
He came into Savannah on a freight with about seventeen other kids, as he remembered it. “I was cold and hungry. So I dropped off to get something to eat. This big fuzz grabbed me. ‘For what?’ I asked. He grinned. ‘Vagrancy. We don’t like Yankee bums around here.’” Mitchum told him he had money and he was about to pick up some more. “He just belted me with his club and ran me in . . . a dangerous and suspicious character with no visible means of support.” It was the common charge in those days. “They were always locking you up for poverty.”
After a few days in the Savannah cooler, young Robert was marched before a magistrate to plead his case. By now, said Mitchum, they were trying to add a shoe store burglary to the charges. It looked like it would go through for awhile, a minimum of five years behind bars. But the robbery turned out to have occurred while the accused was already under lock and key. At that revelation some people in the courtroom snickered and maybe Mitchum smirked or something.
The judge said, “The vagrancy charge still goes, anyway. Seven days with the County. Take him outta here.”
He was taken to the Chatham County Camp No. 1, located in the middle of some hades called Pipemaker Swamp. The mosquitoes were as big as your fist and the swamp rats the size of dogs. It was a chain gang. You wore a metal clamp around your ankles through which they ran a heavy chain connecting you in lines of five prisoners to a chain. At dawn they marched you into a truck and took you to work at hard labor repairing the roads outside Savannah. The sheriff’s department rented its charges to the city for a small profit. It was nothing unusual for those times. Mitchum had heard that in Texas they sold you outright to labor camps, and what became of you after that was none of their concern.
“It wasn’t particularly hard to take. I got fed, you know. I guess it was depressing. The first night, I slept on the floor and the guy next to me was dyin’ of a tubercular hemorrhage.”
The clamp on his leg had been fastened too tight and bit through his flesh. A pustulant ulceration developed. Nobody gave a damn. Every prisoner there was hurt or sick with something. He calculated that there were at least four different virulent diseases making the rounds among his fellow miscreants. Nobody gave a shit. They weren’t running a hospital there, a guard told a guy lagging back, coughing up his insides. There was work to be done. One of the other prisoners told Robert that sometimes if the state needed the labor they would extend your sentence, just make up some infraction and give y
ou another thirty days. Assessing these factors, Mitchum saw no future in chain gang road repair. He got the lowdown on running away. In fact, it was a cinch to take off when you were out on the work detail. The new road bordered the swamp and the trees, and they took the chains off your legs while you worked. They would shoot at you and maybe chase you for a while, but after that nobody would spend sixty cents to try and catch you. They’d just go out and round up someone to take your place. That was all there was to an escape attempt: you either got away or you got a bullet. Out on the highway one of the captains in charge of the work detail was an older man named Captain Fry. He had jaundice, maybe hepatitis: his flesh was the color of margarine, and flecks of bile floated across his eyeballs. He would sit on a camp chair with a .30-.30 rifle on his lap, muttering to himself in the sun. “I don’ know what he sees through them eyes,” a fellow prisoner told Robert, “but I know he blowed a man’s head off last month.” Still, Mitchum thought the jaundiced captain was the best bet, and one afternoon after the sun had dropped behind the trees and the captain was sitting and distracted with chatting to himself, Mitchum turned and ran into the woods. He heard a rifle crack and thought he felt the bullet whizzing alongside his ear. He heard voices shouting and someone blowing a whistle and another rifle shot, and then he was in the thick of the woods and he was gone.
He hitchhiked out of Georgia and up to Baltimore, living for some days in an abandoned house with a gang of derelict youths trying to make a living from dog-napping, snatching the family pooches from wealthy neighborhoods and then returning them when a reward was posted. An infection in his ankle had spread to most of his lower leg. It was swollen and purple and hurt like hell. He covered the open sores with a bandage made from rags, and each time he unwrapped it to take a look it had added a few more colors and pustules. He began to think he might have been bitten by a poisonous snake back in the swamp and wondered if there was an antidote available. He lay on the floor of the old house while his new pals were out stealing dogs. His leg throbbed and he tried to keep from crying. He wrote some lines on the back of a postcard that he intended to mail to his mother: “Trouble lies in sullen pools along the road I’ve taken. . . .”
After some days and the leg getting only worse, he decided to try and get home. The folks were back in Delaware now, though not at the farm. He hitched his way north, though with his pants leg torn open and his calf covered in wet red bandages not many people wanted to give him a lift. At last in Pennsylvania a doctor picked him up and after looking over the leg and giving Robert some pain pills drove him all the way to his mother’s address in the town of Rising Sun. Bob was white-faced and delirious when they carried him in, John would remember, and his leg looked like a festering tree stump. The doctor told Ann that the swollen, infected limb was full of poison and it would end up killing him if it continued to spread. “If you love your son,” the doctor said, “the best thing is to get him to the hospital and get that leg taken off.”
Ann wouldn’t do it. She hated to see Bob suffering, but she couldn’t drag him down to some charity ward and let them saw off his leg. Grabbing up a basket, she set off into the woods that began just behind the house. She was gone for hours, carefully picking out leaves and wild herbs, filling the basket, coming home scratched and mud-spattered. From the dampened and dirty ingredients she made a poultice and applied it to the wounded leg. “She made another and another,” said Annette, “for two days, constantly changing the dressing and drawing the poisons out. And knowing Mother, she probably never slept the whole time. And in the end the poison had been all drained and the fever and swelling began to go down. And my brother kept his leg.”
In Robert’s absence, the Mitchum clan’s sojourn in New York had come to an end. There was little work on Broadway these days, and Annette had gone to join her husband, now transferred to Long Beach, California. Left to depend on themselves, the Major and his family were unable to meet even their minimal expenses in Manhattan and soon abandoned the city to live again with Grandmother Petrine and the Tetreaults in rural Delaware. Things were hardly better there. The farm had gone under, and now everyone lived together in an improvised apartment on the ground floor of a fundamentalist church in the tiny community of Rising Sun. Uncle Bill took whatever odd jobs he could find to put food on the table, but resources were stretched thin even before the arrival of Ann and her brood, men, women, and children crammed one on top of the other in the tiny set of rooms. It was worse than the chain gang, Robert thought, but for now there was no place else to go.
His bad leg had become so raw and weak that it would take a month and more to heal. He hated being confined to the sorry, overcrowded apartment, and when Uncle Bill carved out a crutch for him to hobble around on, he eagerly went off in search of whatever excitement a hobbling fifteen-year-old boy could find in Rising Sun and environs. Jack was a young man now, strong and handsome. Away from his brother’s shadow, in recent months he had begun to come into his own, doing well as a student at Caesar Rodney High in nearby Camden. He was an athlete, a good student, a popular boy with new pals and a string of girlfriends. Briefly—and for the last time—the hierarchy was reversed, the older brother tagging along with the younger. Robert sat on the sidelines, watched his brother play football, met his buddies. Jack had female friends now, too. One girl he knew was a pretty and slender brunette with dark eyes, a sweet and soft-spoken thirteen-year-old by the name of Dorothy Spence. They had met at school that autumn and were just getting to know each other. They had walked and talked together and shared a soda or two. Not exactly dates or intimate encounters like those with some other local girls he knew, a few of whom had gone behind the corn shed with him and kissed and played games, but it wasn’t for lack of interest on Jack’s part. “My heart was hers,” he said of Dottie Spence, and he had every intention of getting to know her better as the season progressed. And then, one afternoon at Voshal’s Mill Pond outside Camden, a swimming hole and hangout for the local schoolkids, he made the mistake of introducing her to brother Bob.
To be perfectly honest, Dorothy would say in the years ahead, when asked to recall that momentous first encounter, she hadn’t liked him. He was a smart aleck, he cursed, he told rude stories, he was rather scrawny and odd-looking, like an overgrown urchin in his baggy old clothes, and hopping about on a poorly made crutch. She was friendly and polite and took his teasing good-naturedly because she did like his better-behaved brother, but once Dorothy Spence left the boys for home that afternoon, she didn’t give Jack Mitchum’s older sibling another thought.
Robert, by grand contrast, experienced an immediate and profound attraction to his brother’s dark-eyed, soft-spoken female friend, though typically he disguised his feelings behind a veil of wisecracking indifference. He returned to Rising Sun that day in a state of anxious excitement, moonstruck. All evening he could think of nothing but the girl by the pond, and that night in bed, crouched over one of Jack’s school composition books, he scribbled poetry in a Byronic frenzy, a strange outburst of passionate feeling for a person he had known for one afternoon. “All my lonely life I’ve loved you lovely stranger,” the boy wrote that night.
How to account for such sudden and, as it would prove, unwavering commitment to a largely unknown object of desire? “Love at first sight—ever hear of it?” said his sister. “Real love is always mysterious. Who are we to try and understand it?” Robert’s own recorded assessment was bluntly deterministic and even more to the point: “She was it,” he said. “And that was that.”
All that remained was for someone to tell Dorothy about it.
Robert pursued her all that autumn and winter. He would find his way to Caesar Rodney in the afternoons and wait to see her come out of school, and on Saturdays he would take the bus or hike three miles out to the Spence family home in Camden. He would drag John along for company (at first miffed at the woman-stealing antics of his “rapscallion” brother, Jack soon recognized the singular nature of Bob’s pursuit). They would sit
on the curb outside the Spence place and wait for Dottie to come out and join them, and then Jack the chaperone would sit there bored stiff and twiddling his thumbs while the other two whispered and giggled in each other’s ears.
It was flattering to be the object of such great interest. Boys Dottie’s age were not ordinarily so serious or so romantic. The more she saw of Bob Mitchum, the more she came to revise her initial low opinion of him. Indeed, she came to realize that Bob was a most unusual and exceptional young man, funny and kind and intelligent. He was a poet, of all things, who knew the most beautiful, strange words, and an orator who could recite Shakespeare by heart. He was a colorful and worldly person, too, only a couple of years older than she was, but he had traveled all over and done exciting things, and though his stories of New York City and riding freights and going to jail were often shocking and embarrassing to hear, they were terribly impressive. Robert made everyone else she knew in Delaware look awfully dull by comparison.