by Pete Hamill
Momma kept on keepin on. She could weave. She knew how to shear a sheep and card the wool and spin hit into yarn. Then she sold the weavins to someone who brung them down someplace to the river and sold them. We lived in a little ole shambly place, a shack really, but hit had a good stone fireplace, and there uz always enough pumpkin and sorghum, gravy and onions, cornbread and shucky beans. Most days I watched the least-uns, while Momma worked the loom. She never did mention Daddy and his sin. She dint mention him at all.
And then one night I come home from the woods at night and hit gettin to be real dark cause we had no electrick in them days, not even radios, nothin up in them hills at all. And then I saw the Reverent Woodford in the clearin out back of the shack and hit warnt snakes he was handlin, hit was Momma’s titties. I stayed all night alone in the woods, cryin mostly for my Daddy, and began to thinkin about goin out to the world.
I knew there had to be a world out there, cause I seen hit in the Montgomery Ward catalogs. I couldn’t read the words, but Cousin Frances could. And I near memorized the names of the things you could get out in the world. Dr. Scott’s Electric Hairbrush, good for headache and dandruff. Don’t laugh, boy! And stuff called Mum and Kotex and Listerine and Odorono. Cuticura soap and perfume called Wild Rose and Shandon Bells and Ylang Ylang and Dr. Fuller’s Bust Developer and Food (I sure never did need that stuff). Most of all I wanted a gown called Moonlight Sonata. I remember what hit said in the catalog: “You, winsome and desirable in clouds of rayon net, your tiny waist sashed with whispering rayon taffeta.” For three ninety-eight. Oh, how I wanted to be winsome and desirable. Down there in the world.
I also knew about the world from Uncle Fred that was married to Aunt Mildred. He’d been down to the world. Actually seen hit, lived in hit, and told me all about hit. How people lived in brick houses and had roads with tar on them and stores with gowns in them better than in the Montgomery Ward catalogs and how everybody went to school and workin people owned cars. I made him tell me over an over about the gowns. And the jewlry. And he could really speak, Uncle Fred, so he made me see all the beautiful stuff of the world.
Then, I met Robert. I uz talkin to him a long time, and then he got to be laying with me crost a bed. Not doin nothin. Jest touchin. But we decided to get married. I said, Okay Momma, but I don’t want that Reverent Woodford to do no service, and she said Why, and I said, Because. So we got us a preacher from over the ridge. He come to the house and did a big praying service for us and later we had a big shivaree and then we moved into the hayloft. Robert war a big strong boy, a woodcutter by trade, but he had him a pindling little dick. That uz so sad. Momma gave me a poke o’ wheat to help me have babies, but hit dint do no good. Hit jest warnt to be. Poor Robert was so worried bout the size of his dick, he couldn’t get hit hard. So he moped all the time and drunk a lot.
He got worse when I started goin to the new school. This got to be round the time Roosevelt sent them teachers into the hills and there was a young man from up North, from Pennsylvania, from out in the world. Eli. He was a Jewboy. Like that boy Max comes in the Dirt Bar. Eli come among us and got us to put up the school. Just a plain board buildin with a tin roof and a stove and no electrick. The girls had to go to the outhouse four at a time to keep them boys out of there. But kids come six, eight mile to that school, and even ef I uz too old, I wanted to learn me something about the world, so I went to that young man from up North and I said I wanted to learn how to read and I’d help with the least-uns if he’d teach me. And he said yes.
Well, you couldn’t learn some of them boys nothin with a pistol in yore hands, but he did his best. Eli. The Jewboy. When there got to be snow on the ground, the kids dint come. When the creeks were up, they stayed home too. But Eli taught us, he showed us words, he had us make poetry, he showed us a great big map of the world. And I’d get all het up and go home and tell Robert. And soon he was sure I was layin for Eli, which I warnt. Robert dint believe me and one night he went down and burnt that school to the ground.
So Eli left and I walked around the hills for two days callin his name, trying to get him to stay. Them hills used to be so thick and beautiful. But then the loggin people come and they started cutting down the trees. They rolled them down to the creeks and floated them off to the mills where they were cut into lumber, and soon the hills were naked. But even in the naked hills, Eli warnt to be seen. And I thought: there’s nothin left for me in this valley.
So I went away. I jest left Robert and went to the town, walkin for days, waitin to see the place with the brick houses and the tar streets and the Moonlight Sonata gowns in the store windows that’d make me feel, you know, winsome and desirable. I couldn’t find hit. Cause that place never did exist except in my foolish damned schoolgirl head. But I did find Hazard and got me a job in a tool store, wearing shoes cause the streets was all mud. And I met some other girls in town and we started goin to these barns, jenny barns they called them, where people drank Cream of Kentucky whiskey out of Coca-Cola glasses and there uz gamblin in the back rooms, and I met other girls that worked in these places, that dint just come for the dancin, girls that were stayin there for the winter, followin the carnivals in the summer. The jenny barns was wild, with music playin and men from all over, down from the hills, comin to the towns, like the hills uz emptyin out. Which they was.
And one day the store I worked in closed from the Depression, which was all over the world by then. So I went to work in the jenny barns and I just dint care. The first time I uz scared and started cryin, sure I’d be slain by the Lord for my terrible sin. But I hadn’t et for three days and the Lord dint hear my prayers so I did what I did to live. After the first time, I dint care. Fact is, I liked hit. Those boys was crazy and wild and drunk and lonesome, but they was all better’n poor Robert. And they sure did love my titties. Trouble is, that’s when I started getting large. There was some shacks back in the woods and I’d go there with them, for three dollars apiece, which was good money in them days. I give the man that run the jenny barn a dollar but hit was all right. I dint care long’s I dint get the old rale, or a good dose, and I was lucky, I never did. I specialized in the other thing anyway. I guess after a while, I was knowed all over for hit.
And then one night, who comes in but Eli. My Jewboy. He couldn’t stand what I uz doin, and asked me to come away with him, and so I did. He uz organizin for the National Miners’ Union now, trying to get everybody to band together against the operators in Harlan County. He was a Communist, my Jewboy, and he lived stricter than some Hardshell Baptist. He only et once a day, so he was all skin an bones, jest pathetic, and he went around makin his speeches, usin a bicycle until someone came in from up North with a Ford car. The only place he warnt strict uz in bed. He got to be the hottest man I ever seed in bed. I even got skinny again. And I’m tellin you, you never heard anything like this boy when he was speechifyin. All about how we should own the fruits of our labor and how the bosses was usin our work to make themselves rich while men was dying in the bottom of coal mines and kids warnt learnin how to read an write. When he talked about readin and writing the tears come to his eyes and to tell the truth, they come to my eyes too, and to everybody that could hear his voice.
And soon they was a war right there in Harlan County. My Jewboy brung down a bunch of big writers from the North to see what was happenin and all the men come from around the hills, living in the streets of the town, in the mud, making tents, houses out of Coca-Cola signs, good men, hurt men, men that had families starvin, men that wanted their kids to learn how to read. It was so goddamned excitin, I tell you. They was guns everywhere. Rifles and pistols. And the women were the hardest, the women warnt so beaten down, and we got together and we war making speeches in the square when the sheriff locked us all up. Sixteen women in all. We sat in jail, singin all the songs that was written at the time. And we saw that the companies really did run the sheriff, jest like Eli said, the company men jest walked in and gave the sheriff his orders, we seed
it, they brung in gangsters from someplace and made them all deputies. And then they let us out, cause they was so many bad stories in the newspapers, and there was another big meetin.
This time they got my Jewboy. They beat him vicious on the head with blackjacks and I seed them carryin him off and I was screamin at them, cause his face was all blood, and when I screamed they bashed him again and then grabbed me and dragged me off. So they took my Jewboy out to the county line and they dumped him in a ditch. Some of the men found him and got him to a hospital but hit war too damn late. Two days later he died. When someone asked the sheriff why they arrested poor Eli, the sheriff jest smiled and said quote unquote resistin assault. Some joke. They said too that Eli had run away, he escaped and that uz why he war in that ditch, and nobody got locked up for it, even though everybody in the county knew it was murder, plain and simple.
That was hit for me. I left then. Forever. I dint want nothin to do no more with no politics or with them damn hills. I found my way to New Orleans. I had my specialty. I married a man for a while, but nothin come of hit. I made some money in the war. Workin down by the Higgins shipyard. And I thought: I don’t ever want to need nobody ever again. Specially no man. And here I am, boy. You lookin at a free woman. You uz a virgin boy, warnt you? I could tell. Well, it jest got to be time. Get used to hit, boy. You gonna have lots more, all the rest of your days and nights.
Chapter
19
Dixie drove me back to Ellyson Field in her 1950 Plymouth in the gray chilly dawn. We had the windows up and I could smell her perfume. She didn’t say anything. I felt strange. I looked for a woman on a blue bicycle, with a yellow T-shirt and a baseball cap, but she was nowhere in sight. Dixie stopped a hundred feet from the main gate. I opened the door and thanked her for the ride. She looked at me and nodded.
“You’re a nice boy,” she said.
And then pulled away.
PART
TWO
Chapter
20
Then suddenly it was winter. The wind came howling down from Canada, and when we woke up the blankets weren’t warm enough and the showers were cold and we couldn’t tell the time of day from the morning light. We closed all windows tightly and changed white hats to watchcaps. The sky at noon was the color of slate, and thousands of gulls came in from the Gulf to huddle close to the earth. The helicopters were grounded. Gigantic gray clouds rose in the sky. And then one afternoon it began to snow.
We did cartwheels in the snow and threw snowballs at one another, while Becket took pictures with a little box Brownie. Liberty was canceled and we were handed shovels and put on work details to clear the streets of the base and the landing strips beyond the hangars. Out at the hangars, shoveling snow with Sal and Max and a dozen others, I saw the pilots up close, smoking, playing gin rummy, posing for photographs. They were all lean men in loose baggy flight suits. Sal pointed out a Marine who had just come back from Korea, where he’d flown 151 helicopter missions, 86 behind enemy lines, picking up the wounded or the dead. When I looked at his eyes they didn’t seem dashing and cocky, the way Clark Gable’s eyes looked in the old movies; they just looked sad and tired.
Most of the pilots wore patches on their flight suits, showing a goggled grasshopper with a rotor blade above its head and a figure eight below it. And as we scraped the snow off the landing strips I realized I was standing on a huge painted figure eight within a painted square. Max explained that this was a basic part of the training routine, the pilots learning to maneuver with precision, to hover, to land right on a mark. They called the helicopters pin-wheels, whirlybirds, or eggbeaters, and they hated flying them because the center of gravity was so low that they turned over too easily. And after flying jets, said Sal, who would want to play with these toys?
We cleaned the snow away and then the wind rose and blew more snow across the strips and covered them again and Max laughed and said, “Well, that’s the Navy.” I saw a Spanish-looking guy in a flight suit, his features clean, with a neat moustache and high cheekbones standing on the runway taking pictures, and he motioned to us to join him. His name was Tony Mercado, a pilot with the Mexican Air Force, taking copter training in the States. He handed me the camera and asked me to photograph him in the falling snow.
It was a Leica, the first real camera I’d ever held. Heavy, solid, somehow mysteriously beautiful and scary. In all the years since, whenever I pick up a new camera in a store, or heft one of my own for the first time after waking in the morning, I remember that snowy day beside the hangars of Ellyson Field. I’d never felt anything like it before: a piece of machinery that made pictures.
Mercado told me what to do and I looked through the viewfinder and saw him posing before the half-open hangar doors, his smile bright, looking dashing, the snow blowing around him. He had me cock the camera again and then posed squatting, coffee cup casually in his hand, and I realized that he looked more like Clark Gable than any of the pilots who had been to the war. He thanked me in an accented voice and strolled away and I wanted to get the camera back from him and take pictures of the windsock flying straight out in the wind and the snow gathering at the base of the palm trees and Red Cannon hurrying over from the administration building with his plastic face all flushed and Sal loping away to the head. But I said nothing. Max leaned on his shovel and said, “You’re a photographer now.” And of course he was right, but I didn’t know it for a long long time.
The next day the snow was gone. The sun burned its way back, high and dim in the clear cold sky, but it wasn’t strong enough to rid us of the bitter cold. Liberty was restored. I wanted to go to town and search for the curly-haired woman, but after the night at the Dirt Bar I had no money, and it was three more days until payday. Still, Dixie Shafer had erased my shameful secret and I felt triumphant and powerful except for the money. Harrelson and Boswell left for Montgomery and the big service for Hank Williams. When they came back two days later, full of details and white lightning, we were all tired of Hank Williams and nobody wanted to hear about it. I walked through the Panhandle afternoons, listening for Bobby Bolden. But all the windows were still closed against the cold. I thought about going up to see him, but I was afraid he’d play some game in front of the other blacks and tell me to get lost. I wouldn’t let him do that.
We worked long days, with the helicopters flying from 0500 until sunset, thirty of them in the air at once, catching up on lost time. Somewhere in those few days I started to know the difference between push-pull rods and irreversibles, swash plates and wobble plates, cuff and trunion assemblies. I wasn’t sure what a gimbal ring was, but when Sal came to get one, he said that for shit sure it wasn’t available at Macy’s.
All Navy nights resembled one another. Broke, confined, we sat around on the bunks and read the newspapers or listened to the radio. We exchanged what was called “the gouge,” another word for lore, or “scuttlebutt,” which was rumor and gossip. I learned how to spit-shine my shoes. My hair grew longer. I pulled another midnight-to-four, learning the password first, and signed the clipboard once more for Red Cannon. I learned that the best place for tailor-made uniforms was Anchor Tailors on South Baylen Street. The manager’s name was Marie. But I didn’t want tailor-mades. I wanted civvies. I wanted to be able to go into town in normal clothes, with some money in my pocket, and find that woman with the curly hair.
But I needed money for clothes and a locker. As an airman apprentice in pay scale E-2, just above the bottom, I would get a check for $80.90 after the taxes were taken out. A fortune. Finally we lined up one morning at 1020 in Hangar Two to get our paychecks. Everybody else got paid, but there was nothing for me. Maher was the duty yeoman and he said he was sorry, that this sometimes happened to new sailors while the paperwork was being sent back and forth to BuPers in Washington. He’d look into it and let me know. Sal, Max and Miles Rayfield offered to loan me some money; I said I’d wait.
I stayed on the base for more than two weeks, waiting for the paychec
k. Sal and Max went out most nights. Miles remained on board, but went off most evenings to some destination on the base itself, saying nothing. The image of the woman began to fade. I was sure she was with a guy now, perhaps a husband, some Navy lover. The weather stayed cold, but there was no more snow. I read the art book, my head filling with Rembrandt and Goya, Leonardo and Botticelli. At the Supply Shack, I got better at my work each day, and the mechanics now knew my name. I heard other hillbilly singers on the radio, Webb Pierce and Lefty Frizzell, and began to know the words. If Bobby Bolden was playing his horn, nobody on the base could hear him except the mess cooks. One chilly night I was in the barracks reading the Pensacola Journal. Miles and Jones were there. A story on page one said that 40,000 American servicemen had deserted since the beginning of the Korean War and 36,000 had been recaptured. That was astonishing. “Who the hell blames them?” Miles said acidly. “What’s that goddamned war about anyway?” Jones bristled, said it wasn’t a war, it was a police action, and Miles said you couldn’t tell that to the dead, and Jones said that if we didn’t fight the Communists in Korea we’d have to fight them in San Diego, and at that, Miles laughed and shook his head. “Jonesie,” he said, “that’s the hoariest cliché of the decade so far.” Jones bristled again, said there’d always be cowards in any war, men who’d rather run away. Miles said: “We’re talking about two complete divisions of deserters, Jonesie. Doesn’t that tell you something? “Yeah,” Jonesie said. “It tells me this country’s getting soft.” And he walked away.
Miles and I were quiet for a while, and then he looked up at me and said, “Do you ever think of doing it?”