Jackhammered

by Ed Bethune

  The turmoil of Reconstruction, and the difficulties faced by hungry Southerners after the war could have hardened the gentle Bethunes, but it did not. They were an open, loving, God-fearing, and sharing sort of family. In spite of their experiences in Scotland, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, they did not withdraw unto themselves and wind up distrusting outsiders and people in authority, or anyone for that matter. In that respect, they were polar opposites of the Vermilye family.

  Dr. Samuel McBride Bethune and Sarah Jane Herren had six children, one of whom was Samuel Warren Bethune, my grandfather. He was born April 6, 1862, just one month after his father joined the Ashley Light Infantry and left for the fighting at Corinth.

  Samuel Warren Bethune married my grandmother, seventeen-year-old Alice Leonora Brymer in 1885 and soon their first child, my Aunt Delle, was born.

  Alice Bethune was a homemaker, not a businesswoman like Mama Lewallen, and Samuel Warren Bethune, a well-read man, made a living as a Jack-of-all-trades during his early years. Later on, when his children were young, he served a few years as a deputy sheriff for Ashley County.

  Aunt Delle and her younger sisters, Jeffie, and Lillian were, according to most, the sweetest little girls in Ashley County. It surprised no one that they were that way because Alice Bethune was a gentle southern woman, soft-spoken and the picture of grace. The family was poor in money, but they prided themselves on being honest and upright. Samuel Warren Bethune was a gentleman’s gentleman.

  My grandmother, Alice Bethune. Circa 1900.

  The young family was Christian, but they did not wear their religion on their sleeves. They were tough, you had to be to stay alive in rural Arkansas in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but like their ancestors, they were open, trusting and loving people. They trusted that they would get by, that God would provide. They took the scripture that they should be anxious for nothing literally.

  My grandparents, Alice and Sam, finally got a boy, Samuel McBride Bethune, in 1893. Three years later, my father, Edwin, was born. Alice took to him right away. Her girls were old enough to help around the house, and that gave Alice time to dote on little Edwin. He was the love of her life. His sisters made over him too, and so did his brother. Little Edwin loved being loved, all babies do, but few would ever need love as much he would.

  Ugly sounding diseases—smallpox, croup, scarlet fever, pneumonia, diphtheria—were commonplace in Southeast Arkansas in 1898. The swampy environment made it so. Swamp fever was a catchall name that Ashley County people used when they were not sure what was causing a sickness. There are many Bethune headstones in the local cemeteries—big ones and little ones—marking the graves of those who died of swamp fever.

  The scorching, sultry heat of summer also brought a disease that was never mistaken for swamp fever. It was called morning paralysis, a crippling viral disease that targeted children more than grownups. The disease, later known as polio, can strike quickly.

  The poliovirus enters the body by nose or mouth and travels to the intestines. There it incubates and after a few days, victims will feel flu-like symptoms: headache, nausea, vomiting, and fever. In the early stages, victims can pass the virus to others because the disease spreads through contact with infected feces or through an infected mist that travels through the air, getting into food or water. Once the virus enters the bloodstream, the victim begins to make antibodies against it, and in most cases that stops the virus and the antibodies create a lifelong immunity against the disease.

  One person in ten who gets the poliovirus will develop symptoms, but only one out of a hundred will develop the paralytic form of polio.

  Daddy was one of the unlucky ones. The virus found its way into his bloodstream when he was an infant. His sister, my Aunt Delle, remembered the time as if it were yesterday. She said little Edwin was sick for days, crying and crying as the disease spread through his body. Toward the end of the attack he squirmed uncontrollably, racked with pain. His baby neck and baby back stiffened to rock hardness. The disease was attacking his spinal cord. Paralytic polio was busy destroying the nerve tissue in little Edwin’s right leg. When the morning paralysis was finished with him, he lay still. Polio had not taken his life, nor had it attacked his lungs, but it had contorted and paralyzed his right leg and stunted the development of his left leg.

  Daddy never walked a step in his life without a crutch, a cane, or an artificial leg.

  The polio could have twisted Daddy’s mind too, but it did not. His family, especially his brothers and sisters, protected him and showered him with love. Sister Delle was eleven, Jeffie was nine, and Lillian was seven when Daddy got polio. Grandmother Alice and the girls spent hours and hours with him, playing games, teaching him to read and write long before he started school. Uncle Mac, the oldest boy, told me how the entire family included little Edwin in play and work. They did everything they could to keep the focus on what he could do instead of what he could not do.

  No one in the family blamed anyone, especially God, for what had happened to Daddy, and neither did Daddy. They reconciled how bad things happen to people, even those with a steadfast belief in a good and powerful Supreme Being. They lived one day at a time, with as much love as they could muster and held nothing back as a protection against further hurt. They preferred to believe that God did not cause Daddy’s suffering, that He did not single out Daddy and cripple him with polio. Instead, they believed God stood ready to help them cope with the tragedy, and they were open and willing to let him help. It was not a case of them standing independently against the world and against a harsh God.

  There was an old photograph of my dad, now lost, that makes this point better than words. In the picture, Daddy, looking to be about eight years old, is playing baseball. He is sitting on his bottom on the ground behind home plate, his tiny diseased leg askew, and he has a catcher’s mitt on his left hand. The batter is in the box and the pitcher is on the mound. Daddy is actually playing the position of catcher in a sandlot game of baseball. He was wearing knickers, one pant leg folded and pinned up high, and a country cap that made him irresistibly cute. He looked like a Norman Rockwell paperboy who had just stopped by to play an inning or two.

  From that one image, you could sense the pride, satisfaction, and sheer happiness Daddy was feeling. He was playing one of the most important positions, catcher. He could not move, but he could catch and throw. He was doing what he could and not worrying about the rest of it, which is, basically, the story of his life. The brotherly and sisterly love found its way into my father’s heart and stayed there for the rest of his life. He was, by any measure, entitled to be bitter, but he was the gentlest, happiest, most softhearted person I have ever known.

  Aunt Delle, who became a rock-solid Baptist, told me that Daddy spent a lot of time thinking about miracle cures that might let him one day know the joy of running to first base, kicking a football, riding a bike, or dancing. When he was a little boy, he often asked her about the miracles Jesus had worked, but he also asked her about mystics, snake handlers, and healing preachers. Aunt Delle said they talked often about such things, but in the end, Daddy gave up on expecting a miracle and settled for the idea that God would and could work in his life in other ways to make him an extraordinary person. He consoled himself by excelling in things that he could do: writing, penmanship, speaking and reading. He had physical limitations, but he did not let that erode his extraordinary ability to learn, and to deal kindly and fairly with people. About the only thing that bothered my father was when some thoughtless fool treated him as a case, a problem, or a curiosity. This he always deeply resented.

  The men in the Bethune family began leaving Ashley County for Little Rock in 1910. First, it was Grandaddy Bethune, then Uncle Mac, the oldest boy. They went to the big city to find work so they could send money home to Grandmother Alice. They took Daddy with them when he was seventeen years old. My father was quite literate and personable by then; no surprise to those who knew him. He always worked hard to be the best
at things that did not require two good legs. Grandaddy, who had learned to make money by selling insurance door to door in Little Rock, taught my father how to peddle the cheap debit policies that were so popular in the early part of the last century. Daddy learned how to find customers, make the pitch, and close the sale. It was hard for him to get from place to place, particularly in the days when there were few automobiles and good roads were nonexistent. Nevertheless, he did it and became good enough at it that selling insurance became the thing he always turned back to on the many occasions in his life when he would “go bust.”

  The debit insurance team. Daddy is at bottom left and my grandfather, Samuel Warren Bethune is at top right. Circa 1920.

  “Going bust” was a regular part of my father’s lifecycle because he was a world-class dreamer. He always tried to live out his dreams no matter how lofty, or goofy, they might have seemed to others. It was as if he had decided early on that he was not going to let the polio limit him anymore than it had. The wonder is that his failures never seemed to bother him or change him. His dreams were his secret weapon. They outdid the elixirs peddled by the ever-present snake-oil salesmen of that era, and he sipped that inexhaustible source of hope for the entirety of his life. When things did not work out for him Daddy did not let it get him down. He just kept on dreaming, cheerfully going about the business of living.

  In 1923, when Daddy was twenty-six, his insurance business was prospering but his good fortune was not to last. Grandaddy Sam’s Model T car broke down and Daddy tried to fix it. He opened the hood and bent over the motor to see what was wrong. When he tried to adjust the spark and fuel-flow the fan belt broke, whipping up and hitting Daddy in the face with great force. The impact knocked his right eye askance. It was beyond repair when he got to a doctor’s office. They just pushed it back into the socket and covered it with a patch. It was useless for seeing, and after some time it turned a different color.

  There is an old saying that perfectly explains Daddy’s lot in life: When it rains, it pours. Just as he was recovering from the loss of his right eye, he fell down a flight of stairs shattering the bones in his withered right leg, the one paralyzed by polio. The doctor that treated him said there was no alternative; he amputated the shattered, paralyzed leg.

  Six months later Daddy slipped and fell when getting out of a car and broke his hip. The president of the insurance company he was working for wrote a newsletter article calling Daddy, “an everyday hero.” The article told how everyone was “impressed by his happy and optimistic attitude while lying helpless in bed in a plaster cast … amusing himself by playing his banjo and reading books.”

  Now, at age twenty-eight, Daddy had only one good eye and one partially good leg. In those days, before the era of Social Security disability, Medicaid, or legally imposed accommodations for the disabled, the path to success for those with disabilities was a long road. To make matters worse, the country was nearing the time of the Great Depression. Any one of the hardships Daddy suffered would have crushed a lesser man but I never heard him complain about his disabilities. Instead of whining, my intrepid dad found ways to overcome his disabilities, or at least live with them.

  Daddy in his Model T. Circa 1925.

  Selling debit insurance was his mainstay, but in his youth, Daddy fortunately managed to learn the fine art of government bureaucracy. He got his first experience near the end of World War I when many young men were gone to war and that opened up several clerical and administrative jobs in state and county government. The ministerial jobs—all short-term—were just right for my father when he first entered the workforce. Selling insurance worked for him, but there were slow times when he first started and the government jobs came in handy, particularly after he got hurt and the doctor amputated his leg. It was a way to earn a living and put food on the table; a way to “keep body and soul together,” Daddy was fond of saying.

  For the next few years, Daddy drifted between an assortment of jobs in state government and selling debit insurance. The routines of working for the government came easily to him, and that experience, coupled with what he learned selling insurance, led him to a job with the Arkansas Revenue Department in 1928, just as the Great Depression was about to strike. It was his job to collect or workout ways for people to pay overdue taxes, not an easy task when so many businesses were failing and people were out of work.

  Daddy’s territory as a tax collector was Northeast Arkansas, and his travels frequently took him to Pocahontas, and to Lewallen Café on the town square.

  3

  HARD HEAD MEETS SOFT HEART

  Let the ideas clash but not the hearts.

  C. C. Mehta

  It was in Pocahontas in the late summer of 1932, that Mother fell for the good-looking, highly personable man regaling everyone in Lewallen Café with one funny story after another. He only had one leg and one good eye and he walked on crutches but that didn’t bother Mother, actually it seemed to attract her, and I now believe that she saw it as a chance to love and mother someone as she had done with Little Gerle.

  Seven months later, on March 20, 1933, they married and moved to Little Rock. Daddy was a good man and Mother knew it but he was also her ticket out of Pocahontas, a chance she was not about to miss.

  The marriage became a ten-year attempt to mix oil and water. Daddy and Mother had two entirely different perspectives of how life should be lived. Daddy had enjoyed the blessing of growing up in a family of loving caregivers, a family that met his needs. He learned to trust and thought of the world as a trustworthy place. Mother’s family did not neglect her or mistreat her, but the Vermilye worldview coupled with the death of Little Gerle had turned her inward and taught her to distrust. To be vulnerable was a sign of weakness. A Vermilye should be strong and independent. Unfortunately, the ability to trust and bond with others will not develop if we do not have the ability to need others. If we do not learn that lesson early in life, then when we are older our inability to trust becomes a barrier to living fully, to relating to others.

  Could such a marriage survive?

  There were other, more apparent differences. Could a disabled man—a softhearted dreamer—partner with a young, beautiful, physically active woman who had little tolerance for foolishness or wishful thinking? How could that work?

  No one dared discuss it, and perhaps it was too early for anyone including Mother and Daddy to see, much less admit, the inevitable conflict of beliefs and lifestyles. I suppose it was a case of opposites hoping that their attraction for each other would overcome their differences.

  Daddy was a Bethune, through and through—soft-spoken, willing to yield and accommodate, and forever trusting. Mother, on the other hand, was a rock-solid Vermilye. She had started out with a view similar to Daddy’s, and she kept some soft traits and beautiful artistic qualities that surfaced from time to time—she loved to paint and enjoyed a good laugh—but the loving heart of her youth was hard to find. At this point in her life she preferred the hard, protective edge, especially when she felt vulnerable or at risk to be hurt.

  They did agree on one thing as soon as they found an apartment in Little Rock. Mother would not take a job outside the home. She knew nothing but waitressing and café work, and in 1933, it was hard for a woman to find another kind of work. It was a good decision because Mother was soon to have her first child.

  On December 19, 1933 my sister, Delta Lew (short for Lewallen), was born in Pocahontas. Mother decided as she neared her time of labor with Delta Lew that she wanted to be in Pocahontas so Doc Baltz could attend to the delivery. At that time, and for many years to come, Pocahontas had several chiropractic doctors. Local people, for clarity, called them “chiropractors” and they called the medical doctors “real doctors.” Doc Baltz was a real doctor that Mother trusted. He delivered my sister in the house where Mother had grown up and Little Gerle had died.

  It was the deepest point of the Great Depression. People were out of work and there was little cause for hope.
My parents told me later that they had it “easier, but not better than most Americans.” For one thing, Daddy had a government job but more significantly, both of them had grown up in families that had experienced hard times for years, long before the onset of the Great Depression. In their mind, the rest of the world was just now learning to live with the shortages and deprivations their families had lived with for years.

  Shortly after meeting Mother, Daddy managed to shift out of the tax-collecting job he disliked at the Revenue Department to a better job at the Arkansas Department of Welfare. There, doing work for which he was better suited, he made many friends and drew the attention of the political leaders in Arkansas. Daddy impressed them with his people skills, which by then were finely tuned. He knew how to work within the bureaucracy and he knew how to make it work for those who needed help.

  It was fortuitous that Daddy got the transfer to the Welfare Department, for in 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office as the thirty-second president of the United States, and one of the first programs he put in place was the Civilian Conservation Corps, better known as the CCC. The Welfare Department took on the job of selecting boys to join the CCC. The program would house, clothe, and feed them and it put thousands of young boys to work building roads and public projects throughout the United States. There were a number of CCC camps in Arkansas and Daddy got a job for which he was particularly suited. He became the director of selection for the CCC. He would find and select young boys who really needed help.