The Byrds of Victory

  The car rolled off the pavement onto the dirt road two blocks from the house without rattling or bouncing the way our Model T always did when Papa was driving. It was real smooth and heavy. I left Adrianne and the kids in the car and walked across the yard. My hands hurt from holding the steering wheel. It was dark in the yard, but the inside of the house was bright. I heard them talking before I reached the door, one thing clearly, Mama saying, “Raymond.”

  The living room was full of people. I knew all of them, but they looked strange. They looked at me, and I looked back. Mama hugged me and put her head on my chest. I looked at Hilbert and Gilbert, who were not crying, and Noona and Judy, who were. Johnette was not there. Some neighbors and other people we knew were in the room.

  I put my hand on Mama’s back. She said, “Bliss, he went out to feed the goats and was coming back. He fell down at the back steps and called my name. I ran to him, but he couldn’t say any more. He passed away right there in my arms.”

  I patted her on the back and found a seat. “Where’s Johnette?” I asked.

  “They’re driving in and won’t be here till way in the morning.”

  “Have you been to see him?” Gilbert asked.

  “No.”

  “Want to?”

  “I guess so. Have y’all?”

  “Yeah, we have. Noona has. Mama and Judy don’t want to. We need to decide who’s going to sit up with him.”

  I said I would. “All night?” Hilbert asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ll come about three and spell you,” Gilbert said. “You’ll be sleepy.”

  I had Adrianne bring the kids in and put them to bed, and I drove to the funeral parlor. I should have stayed longer at the house, but I didn’t want to be expected to talk. I had seen enough to know a dead body is not a person. Old John Green, the undertaker, showed me in to where he was. He’d lost some weight since we moved, it looked like. His heavy cheekbones and big chin stuck out under his white skin. The skin was loose and thin-looking, draped over him kind of like a sheet. His eyes were hollow and sunken-looking. I had never felt like this. I felt chilled like there was nothing in the world but Papa there in front of me. I touched his hand. It was hard and cold like a piece of steel with a light cloth over it. It was and wasn’t him. Like the house and town and me and Mama and my brothers and sisters, it was where he had been. He was sixty.

  Only one thing puzzles me about dying. They say energy can’t be created or destroyed but can only change form. We couldn’t be alive without energy, so where does it come from and where does it go? Where is the energy that was my daddy’s life? I don’t want a religious or symbolic answer. I want the hard facts, and I can’t have them because nobody has them. Do you know what we know? Nothing. I’m not educated, but I know that nobody knows any more about the gut questions than I do. We don’t even know how we think. The brain is able to do almost anything and still doesn’t know how a thought is formed. In other words, the brain doesn’t understand itself. I left the room Papa was in and sat down outside. Old John brought me some coffee. “When did you get here, Preacher?”

  “Just got in.”

  “I think it hit sudden. I don’t think he hurt or worried much. Are you going to sit with him by yourself?”

  “Hilbert and Gilbert will be up after while.”

  “He raised a big family, plenty to carry on the family name and all. He was proud of you boys.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Oh, I saw him a few weeks ago at the post office, and he filled me in on what all y’all were doing and where you were. I could tell by the way he talked. He wasn’t a man to come right out with how he felt. But he could tell you just as plain in his way if you paid attention. He was a brave man.”

  Old John turned away as he finished, and I said, “Yes, he was,” and I leaned over on my knees and cried without making any noise. I held my ankles and cried, and the tears hit the floor between my shoes. I was going to go back in later, but I couldn’t do it the way I had the first time. I kept going out and coming in because I was trying to take it. Every time I went in, I hurt so bad I had to go out again. The closer I got to him, the more I hurt. I kept thinking it would go away if I tried enough times. It was like a magnetic field.

  When I went in, I felt this unbearable grief all over me like an electric shock. I got close once by coming in sideways, and it hit me so hard I almost fell. I finally gave up and waited in the outside room. Old John came back in from whatever he had been doing and gave me more coffee.

  “Are you getting tired?” he asked.

  “Yeah, it was a long trip.”

  “Bring your family?”

  “They’re at the house.”

  “I’m going home. Call me if you need anything. You don’t have to answer the phone. It rings at home.”

  I said okay.

  “I’m not going to try to console you. You and Raymond have both had a hard bark. I don’t know how you feel or what you’re like inside. That’s your business. I don’t know what else to say or if I should say anything.”

  “How do you feel, John?”

  He smiled a little and said, “Well, different than you might think, especially in a small town where you know everybody. There are two ways you can go, joke about it and not take it too seriously or be real solemn and let it eat you up. I try to stay somewhere in-between.”

  “I think you do just right, John. We’re lucky to have a man like you.”

  “Thank you, Preacher,” he said, and he went out to his car and left me alone.

  It was two o’clock, and I was glad in a way to be by myself. I wasn’t going in to Papa anymore, and I wanted to think. The obvious thing was that there was no one to run the shop. That didn’t appeal much, but I didn’t have a reason to stay in San Angelo. It hadn’t been my fault but was still a disaster. Adrianne would rather have stayed in her country. There was not as much demand for a blacksmith-welder down there, though, and that’s what I was now, not a Marine or a football player. I was a blacksmith because I took after Papa. It was all right. It was work like any other work. I didn’t much enjoy it, but I could do it pretty well. Adrianne always said I should have been a football coach, and she tried to get me to go to college after the war. I wasn’t interested because I didn’t want to play the politics a coach has to play. A blacksmith works in the grime and heat. You keep the shop dark so you can see to work the hot, red metal. The work is hard, and you get scraped and burned a lot. It’s particularly hard on your eyes. In the old days, a lot of men went blind from accidents in blacksmith shops. I kept a big magnet to pull the steel slivers out of my eyeballs. You have to stop and shoot the bull, but you can tell a man to go jump if you want to. You may not have his work anymore and may not be able to make him jump, but you will have plenty to do if you’re good. You can be independent.

  I was ready to see Hilbert and Gilbert. I was exhausted and went home. Mama had the funeral at the Victory Church of Christ. Papa had been a member of the Church of Christ but quit going after the church split at Lodge Pole. He and Mama were married on a preacher’s front lawn with their families behind them. She made me go when I was a kid. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t think of a better place, though. I think he believed in God but didn’t believe in churches. I doubt if it made him any difference where they had his funeral, and they did sing a song I have always liked, “It Is No Secret What God Can Do.”

  Everybody in town was there. All the seats were filled, and people stood up in the back and halfway down the sides. It hit me all over again, and I was unable to keep from crying. Adrianne and I left Benny and Belle with a neighbor lady. I thought they were too young. Adrianne sat with Mama and my sisters because I was one of the pallbearers. It was hard to feel his weight. Tears ran down my face and got my collar wet, but I kept from busting out or sobbing. It was horrible. Old John took him to the cemetery, and it wasn’t quite so bad out there in the open air and sunshine. It was a nice day. As they lowered him, I thoug
ht I had two to go see now.

  The principal reason I think Papa was not more outwardly religious was that he was not afraid to die. I think the most religious people are those most afraid of death. I know they want everyone else to be. I think we live to die myself. Benny told me last year that three billion people have lived and died. That’s as many as are alive right now. If you think about them and not just yourself, you see it in a different light. You see that we live to die. I’ll tell you something else. There is no good way. Papa didn’t have a good death, and nobody else does either. There is not one.

  We moved back two weeks later. Victory is a pretty good town with lots of trees, a wide main street and a good school. All the streets are paved. Downtown keeps getting bleaker, unlike the Thirties when it was going to be the county seat and there was a string of cars all the way up and down till ten o’clock on Saturday night. San Angelo was too big for my taste with forty or fifty thousand people. I was more comfortable in Victory. It is a matter of knowing people in one place and not knowing them in another. And people try harder to get along in a small town because they have to see one another all the time. It made sense to come back where I already had a shop and people knew me.

  We took a week to move into a little house near the water tower, and three weeks and a day after Papa died, I re-opened the shop. Going in there reminded me of him. It was like I could smell him and almost hear him moving around. He had a way about him, methodical and quick at the same time, and he looked at things with complete attention. He had steel glasses and wore his clothes loose, even though it was hard to find clothes big enough. He made his own set of tongs after he became a blacksmith. Tongs are tools to hold things. They’re like big pliers with two arms and a hinge and teeth or jaws to do the holding, from a foot and a half to three feet long and made with different types of jaws to hold things like flat irons, angle irons, big and little pipes and so forth. He made twelve or fifteen, and they were on the tong rack on the forge. There was also the ten-pound sledgehammer he brought from Marble County. A new load of coal had been delivered before he died and was stacked in the corner. I hoped it wouldn’t have too much sulphur in it because that could nearly kill you. The smoke killed the sparrows in the eaves when the forge was fired if there was a lot of sulphur in the coal. We had a concrete floor in the room with the forge, triphammer, grinder and drill press. The other part, where we could work on trailers, cars and other big jobs, had a dirt floor and had to be wet down every few days. Being in there wasn’t upsetting. I went about nine o’clock at night, so nobody was there to bother me. I raked the floor and got up all the burnt welding rods and little pieces of metal. Then I unrolled the water hose and sat on a wooden chair to spray the floor. Dirt smells good wet.

  We didn’t have a real good house, but Adrianne cleaned it up and made it a home. Business was fairly good. Farmers need a blacksmith. I had always been a good welder, and I started picking up the other things. Through necessity, I got good with the forge. Papa had always done most of that. I taught myself to temper plow points evenly after they had been heated. Never tried horseshoeing because it is too much of a specialty. It’s an art when it’s done right.

  Starting at age 11, my chief responsibilities as a kid were painting farm implements and trailers with the aluminum paint Papa liked to use, grinding plow points and moldboards on an emery rock driven by a wide belt and a big electric motor, operating the drill press and using the sledgehammer to bend steel heated by torch or on the forge. We eventually got an eight-pound sledge to go with the ten. To avoid breaking the hammer handle or somebody’s bones, you’ve got to set and keep your feet in the right spots, hold the end of the handle with your left hand and slide your right hand down to your left as the hammer head falls, adding force when the blacksmith says “hard” and letting up for “light” or “medium.” You can bend or break anything with enough licks, and you use the anvil because it is the only thing in the world a sledgehammer cannot bust.

  I got hold of the best dog I ever had, half-coyote and I don’t know what else. Maybe collie. A guy that came into the shop with a muffler hanging had a litter of pups in a box. He said the bitch must have got covered by a coyote. I neglected to ask what she was. After I fixed the muffler, he paid what I asked, five bucks, and gave me my choice of the litter. I picked the biggest and most playful, which will always be the smartest. He had just been weaned. I put him in an empty welding rod box and called him Windsor because he had such a royal ancestry. I have liked animals all my life, but anyone should have liked Windsor. He was even-tempered and quiet and smarter than some people. I taught him to climb a ladder at the lumber yard when he was only a year old. I got him to where I’d say, “Let’s go, Windsor,” and he would run out and jump through the pickup window.

  We had him nine or ten years. He started getting whipped in dogfights and got stove up. Somebody shot him five or six times with a twenty-two when he was younger, and I took him to the vet and got the bullets out, and he pulled through. But somebody poisoned him after he got old. He stayed down a couple of days and died. I took him to the sand hills north of town, where his daddy had probably lived, and buried him. We had a lot of dogs, bird dogs and just pets after Windsor, but no more like him.

  I don’t know why some people hate dogs enough to shoot or poison them when they aren’t doing anything but minding their own business. I think the ones who do that would kill people out of meanness or craziness if they could get by with it. They know they can kill animals. Why are dogs such pleasant company? It could be that they don’t talk back. Another is you can mess up, and a dog won’t hate you.

  There is not much for people in a small West Texas town to look at, you know, except one another, and that is the principal occupation here, where I have provided them with a lot of recreation. For one thing, I have always been a drinking man. Some have drunk as much as me but didn’t come in for as much discussion because they drank theirs out of more expensive glasses.

  We have had a number of characters around Victory and Victory County. One was Wild Bill Bannon, who had some sense except when he was running a coyote with his greyhounds. Then he was absolutely crazy. He got his name because of his coyote hunts. When he got on a chase, nothing made any difference except those hounds and that coyote or rabbit. He knocked down fences or jumped ditches till his pickup was torn up, and all the time he’d be jumping up and down in the seat, hitting the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and hollering, “Whaoo! Whaoo!” Benny and I went with him one time just so Benny could have the experience. The hounds went under a fence, and Wild Bill ran out and started kicking it down.

  I said, “Bill, whose fence is this?”

  He said, “I don’t know! Help me knock it down, Preach!”

  I told him that man wouldn’t appreciate having his fence torn down so we could run coyotes, and I made him quit. Another time, we were hot on a chase, and he was jumping up and down and beating the wheel when we came to an irrigation ditch. He jumped ditches all the time, but this was a permanent, wide one with concrete sides. The front end and then the back hit the far side, we busted our heads and the engine died. He had bent the frame and knocked the back axle off. We hit it going forty or fifty miles an hour. We got out, and he looked at the pickup for a few seconds and looked for the hounds and asked me, “Did you see which way they went?

  Wild Bill Bannon was older than me and was not in either world war. A lot of men my age were not in World War II. I don’t know about all of them, but I know of one old man, a big farmer, who knew some people on the draft board, and his sons were never called. There was a guy at Crosstie seven miles up the road who went out and put his arm on the railroad track when he heard war had broken out. He let the train take his left hand off rather than be called. I may have been hasty to go like I did, but it was better than being hesitant or afraid. A man is better off to go ahead and jump in. Although the war was worse than I thought it would be, things are usually not so bad if you just go ahead an
d don’t build them up in your mind. I have no ill will toward those who didn’t go. The way I see it is this: there is a reason for everything that happens, and people find their natural times and places for what they do.

  When the braceros were still coming from Mexico to work, the grocery stores needed people who could speak Spanish because most of the braceros couldn’t speak any English. Wild Bill went into McDonald’s Grocery Store to get a job, and they asked if he could speak any Spanish.

  He said, “Oh, you bet. I can spit that stuff out all day long.” So they hired him.

  The next day was a Saturday, and a bunch of braceros came in. Wild Bill went up where they were looking the dairy products and said, “Whatchy wantchy, eggsies?”

  He had a job during the Depression in a cafe. He had long black hair and would be cooking hamburgers and run his fingers through his hair. Then he mashed out a hamburger pattie with his hands and slapped it on the grill, and in a little while he ran his fingers through his hair again.

  One day, Old Jack Glass sat down and ordered a coconut and a hard-boiled egg. “What do you want that for?” Wild Bill asked.

  “I just want something I know you can’t get your damn greasy hands on,” Old Jack said.

  The bad thing about a small town is that it can be hard to get by. The shop was never much of a money-maker. You could make a living with it if you put in ten hours a day six days a week. I opened at eight and closed at six or seven. I have worked until midnight when I had a bunch of plow points to sharpen, but I always lost what I gained by being tired for a couple of days. I paid Mama a hundred dollars a month. We never formally decided who it belonged to. It was hers, I suppose, but I just looked on it as helping her out. When she got on Social Security a few years after Papa died, I started looking around for something that would pay better.