The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  The day of the big storm was a sound-and-sight show of such intensity that we feared the noise itself would wipe us from the face of the earth if the deluge of water failed to sweep us away. I got caught at Latha’s store, where I was still trying halfheartedly to put together an issue of the Star that would say something about Mare’s heroic death. The storm was so terrible that Latha decided we’d better make a dash for her fraid-hole.

  Everybody else in Stay More took refuge in their fraid-holes. Each house in town had a storm cellar in the back yard, an excavation roofed over with boards or bricks or rocks or sod, depending on the builder or the sense of architectural aesthetics, and large enough to contain the whole family in the event of a tornado, an event which had never happened hereabouts. No one could remember when anybody had ever been afraid enough actually to use the fraid-holes before. In the back of our minds, we knew the fraid-holes could now be used in case the enemy, the real Nazis or Japs, ever flew their bombers over us and dropped bombs on us, but just as we had never seen a tornado we had never seen a bomber or any other kind of airplane. Thus the fraid-holes were strictly for insurance: contingencies, possibilities, peace of mind. But into the bargain they provided storage space for the larder, the pantry: the fraid-holes were lined with shelves and shelves of each season’s garden produce put up in glass Mason jars, as well as jams and jellies and preserves made from peaches and grapes and muscadines and strawberries and blackberries, as well as bins of Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, apples, and such.

  Latha’d had the presence of mind to snatch up a loaf of bread from her store shelves, and thus during our long stay in the fraid-hole waiting out the storm we had plenty of jelly sandwiches. She had also snatched up a parcel post package that she identified simply by saying, “It came today.” When we had eaten the sandwiches and night was coming on, and she had reassured me that my Aunt Rosie probably assumed that I was safe and sound in this fraid-hole, just as Latha’s husband Every Dill knew that she herself was probably here for the duration of the storm, I asked her what was in the parcel post package, and she just said, “Oh, it’s just for when we get restless or bored.”

  I laughed and said, “Aw Latha, you know I’d never get restless or bored with you!”

  She laughed too, and said, “In that case, I won’t open it.”

  If there is either a quizzical or restless expression on your face, it may be because you are wondering why I have never before mentioned, in this story, my Aunt Rosie, with whom I lived. And I will never mention her again, if I can avoid it. Her house was just up the road a ways from Latha’s store, and I spent as little time there as I possibly could. I won’t even mention at all the man she was married to. The only thing to be said about Uncle Frank Murrison is that there were still rumors he had once upon a time been “carrying on” with our schoolteacher, Miss Jerram.

  “Open it,” I said to Latha. “This storm won’t ever stop.”

  When Latha finally opened the package, slowly, not as if she were teasing me but as if she were opening a present and deliberately teasing herself, it contained a thing made of plastic, looking very modern, with some knobs and a dial on it, and a name, Philco. And there was a large thing—“battery,” Latha said—which had to be put into it and attached to it. The importance of this moment was such that you may have decided to calm the thunder so that we could listen. Thank you. I may need to have you stop all the waterworks soon.

  “What is it?” I asked. “And where’d you git it?”

  “Sears Roebuck,” she said. “It’s a home radio.”

  Of course I had heard of radios, although I’d never seen one. I knew that in the cities, where they had electricity, everybody had one. There was no electricity in Newton County, but apparently you could make a radio operate with one of these big batteries.

  Latha got it to working, and my mouth must have fallen open. There were human voices coming from it, and then some kind of strange music! And then a lot of noises that Latha said was “static.” She played around with the knobs, turning the dial, and almost as if somebody was trying to tell her what to do, a guy said, “Ah! Ah! Ah! Don’t touch that dial! Listen to Fibber McGee and Molly!” She quit touching the dial. Then for a whole half of an hour, a story took place involving this man called Fibber and his wife. If you listened carefully, it was a funny story, but it wasn’t nearly as good a story as the ones Latha could tell, and I told her that, and she started crying. “No, really,” I said. “I like your stories a lot better.”

  But if Latha was upset because the radio was going to be her competition at storytelling, I discovered that I was going to have some serious competition in the area of journalism. A program of world events came on, and there was instant news, right out of the man’s mouth, as if somebody were putting it easily into your ear instead of making you try to read the words. My newspaper couldn’t compete with that.

  The biggest world event was about the firebombing of Tokyo, in which two hundred and seventy-nine B-29s dropped napalm all over the city, killing 140,000 people. Latha started crying over that too. “Women, children, and old folks,” she said.

  But even though I was a Jap, and could identify with Latha’s pity and sorrow, I felt a kind of elation too, and I asked, “Won’t it hurry up the end of the war?” And she had to admit that it would.

  A loud pounding came on the storm cellar’s thick wooden door, and, opening it and holding her lantern high, Latha discovered the Whitter family: the mother, Jim John, Tildy, and a littlun whose name I couldn’t recall. Yes: it was Suke. All of them were wet as dogs.

  “Our fraid-hole is a-fillin up with water!” Ora Belle Whitter cried to Latha. The Whitter place was just north of Latha’s, but lower, closer to the creek, which must have begun overflowing its banks.

  Latha invited them to share our fraid-hole, but Jim John, pointing at me, said “I aint a-gorn in thar, Maw! I din’t know he was here.”

  “Boy, he aint got no disease I heared tell of,” his mother said.

  “He’s a Jap!” Jim John said. “A dirty Jap.”

  Ora Belle Whitter snorted a laugh. “Stay out in the storm then!” she said to her son, and ushered the rest of her family into the shelter.

  But Jim John relented, and, being sure that I had a full view of every mean face he knew how to make, he came on in. I whispered to Latha, “I don’t want the Allies to know about our radio! Turn it off and cover it up.” She smiled, either at the conspiracy of it or her amusement at my hostility toward the Allies. Or maybe she liked, as I did, my referring to “our” radio. Hers and mine, though I hadn’t contributed a cent to its purchase. She put the radio back in its box before Jim John even got a good look at it.

  Before long, there was another knock at the door, and there was the whole Alan family, who lived up above the Whitters but also along the creek, and their low-lying fraid-hole had also filled up with water. But we simply didn’t have any room for them. Latha’s storm cellar couldn’t contain any more people. She suggested that they try the Coes: Lawlor and Dulcie Coe lived nearby, up on the hillside above the village, and all three of their triplets had gone into the service, one of them killed, leaving only Sammy, so their fraid-hole probably wasn’t crowded. I was glad to see the Alans go. I might’ve been willing to share a fraid-hole with the despicable Jim John Whitter, but if Sog Alan had come into our fraid-hole I would’ve had to brave the storm and go elsewhere.

  During the course of that night, the Duckworth family also showed up seeking shelter, and had to be turned away, sent along to the Coes. Their fraid-hole, they said, was completely under water, and the creek was lapping up against the front porch of their house.

  It thus occurred to me, having seen in the space of a short time the three guys who’d broken my arm, that all of the Allies lived in the bottomlands of Stay More, while we Axis inhabited higher elevations. This set me to reflecting philosophically upon the fact that all of us Axis were not only outcasts but also upcasts, in the sense that all of our hous
es were up in the hills and on the ridges and in the mountains. The Allies were practically lowlanders! Or at least their domiciles were situated along the meadows in the floodplain of the creeks. What did this signify? That good people, that is, us, prefer elevations, while bad people, that is, them, would rather avoid the heights? No, probably all that it meant was that the better-off families of the town were those who owned the fertile fields along the watercourses, while the poor families had to content themselves with the rocky uplands. But it clearly revealed to my contemplative mind that there were actual geographical differences between Allies and Axis that I’d never even considered before.

  Thus, when the sun actually appeared for the first time in a week, and I was able to wade to my little newspaper office, I began work on a special issue of the Star that would have three big stories on its front page. I’d never had that many before. The storm news, of course, and the fact that the village proper and all the roads were still under water. (It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to deliver the paper to many of the subscribers without a boat, and nobody in Stay More had a boat.) But the two other main stories on the front page, side by side, were GERALD COE DIES A HERO ON IWO JIMA ISLAND, AND 140,000 PERISH IN TOKYO FIREBOMBING, the juxtaposition of the stories making it look as if all those Japanese were killed in retaliation for Mare’s death. There wasn’t much to say about either event apart from the bare facts, as I had heard the former from Doc Swain and the latter from Latha’s radio, which, I realized, was going to keep the Star in business. Latha let me listen to her radio anytime I wanted to, although she said, “If that battery wears out, you may have to find me another one.” She herself decided to tell no one else about “our” radio. “We don’t want everybody and his neighbor down here listening to Fibber McGee.” From what I’d heard on the radio, I knew the war in Europe was practically finished. I drew a map of Germany for a page of the Star, fanciful but fairly accurate, showing big arrows moving like pincers across Germany, closing in on Berlin. The war Over There was so close to being settled that my model and champion, Ernie Pyle, had already been removed from that theater of operations and was even now heading out onto those Pacific islands like Okinawa, the same kind of places where Mare and thousands of other American boys had been killed. “It don’t look to me,” Willard observed, when I gave him an advance copy of that issue of the Star, “like the war will last long enough for me to get drafted.”

  I didn’t need a boat. By the time I had hand-lettered the text of all the stories and got the paper “put to bed” on my little gelatin press, the waters began to recede, revealing that not only all the low-lying fraid-holes had filled up with mud but also all the foxholes of the Axis. We called a meeting at our headquarters in the back room of the old Ingledew store in order to plan the laborious task of re-digging the foxholes. Willard suggested that a more worthy expenditure of our energy might be to volunteer to help the Allies clean the mud out of their fraid-holes. The Allies’ mothers had shackled all of the Allies with the big job of removing mud from the thousands of Mason jars of food, and shoveling mud from the floors of the fraid-holes. So we took a vote: five of us wanted to get the foxholes rebuilt; seven of us (I voted with Willard) wanted to help the Allies clean their stinking fraid-holes.

  We had to invade them in order to do it. The Allies didn’t want us, at first. We made a whole exciting new war game out of pretending that the Allied fraid-holes were bunkers and pillboxes, and we combined the work of “liberating” the fraid-holes from their mud with the play of make-believe assault. Since so many of the stored apples, sweet potatoes, and suchlike had been ruined in the mud, they became hand grenades that the Allies tossed at us, and we, without knowing it, duplicated Mare’s fantastic deeds on Iwo Jima.

  All of this work and play in constant proximity to the Allies had an effect on Sammy Coe. Or maybe his experience of the night the Coe’s fraid-hole had sheltered the two Allied leaders, Sog and Larry, with their families, had made him begin fraternizing with the enemy. Whatever the case, one day Sammy, who had emulated his big brother Mare in being a fierce Jap, announced that he didn’t want to be a Jap anymore. “I’m gonna jine th’other side,” he declared, defiantly. That was unheard-of. Nobody ever switched sides. Being Allies or Axis wasn’t a matter of choice, like being Republican or Democrat. It was more like being Baptist or Methodist: you didn’t choose your religion, you were born with it, not that any of us Axis were born Jap or Nazi, but we were born outcasts, born as members of the you-group as opposed to the lordly we-group.

  My recent theory or observation that the Allies were bottom-landers while the Axis were uplanders didn’t apply very well to the Coes. They were in-between, the Coe house neither up the hill nor down in the dell, and thus the founders of both the Allies and the Axis, Earl and Gerald, had been Coes, and now Sammy wanted to switch.

  We argued with Sammy, of course, trying to get him to see that there wasn’t any connection between our Japs and the Japs who had killed his brother. We also tried to get him to understand that the Allies probably wouldn’t be willing to accept him as a “convert” to their junta of the chosen. But Sammy’s mind was made up. “Any of you fellers tries to stop me,” he threatened, “will git knocked on your head.” One day he was seen climbing the wood rungs that made a ladder up the tall sycamore tree that led to the Allies’ aerial fortress. Since he was alone, they did not repulse his ascent. He entered into the house where Noah Ingledew had lived a century before, high up there in the twisting branches. The next school day, he requested of Miss Jerram permission to move from the desk he shared with Gypsy to sit at a vacant desk on the Allied side of the aisle.

  One night we were sitting around in our headquarters grumbling about having lost the superiority we’d thought we’d gained over the Allies, and the distinct possibility that Sammy could reveal all of our military secrets to the enemy. If not that, there was the distinct possibility that, now the mud had dried in our baseball field and we could commence a new season of ball games, Sammy, who had been our able shortstop, would be playing for the Allies. With his help in the field and at the plate, they could beat us badly. Ella Jean could play shortstop but she simply wasn’t a hitter.

  These lamentations were interrupted by a knock at the door: it was the code knock, four shorts and a long. We counted heads: there was nobody missing. Who could be out there? Maybe, we thought, the secret code knock had been given away to the enemy by Sammy, and the enemy was outside the door, ready to attack our headquarters! “Don’t open that yet!” Willard said, and he went to the door and asked, “Who’s there?” A voice answered “Sammy” but it wasn’t like his voice; too high and shaky. “Are ye alone?” Willard asked.

  “Yeah, please let me in,” said the voice that didn’t sound like Sammy’s.

  “If it’s all of ’em,” Joe Don said to Willard, “we’ll fight ’em man for man!”

  We opened the door. It was only Sammy. We couldn’t let him in, because he was the enemy. He stood there in the doorway, whining, “Lookee at what they done to me,” and he pulled up his shirt to reveal the red welts on his chest: he had been branded. He told us what had happened. In an initiation ceremony, solemnizing his rite of passage into the Allies, because he had been a part of the enemy for years, he had been required to sit still while they took a nail, embedded in a long stick and held in the fire until it was glowing hot, and made three small marks in the skin of his chest in the form of the letter A.

  “What’s the A stand for?” Willard asked Sammy.

  “‘Allies,’ of course,” Sammy declared.

  “Why, them Allies aint got the sense to pound sand in a rat hole!” Willard observed. “They couldn’t find their way to first base if there was signs all along the way.” He looked around at the rest of us to see if we also understood his estimate of the Allies’ stupidity, but, I’m ashamed to say, we were rather slow in getting it. “Hell’s bells,” Willard demanded of us, “caint you’uns think of anything else that A coul
d stand for?”

  “Arkansawyer?” I offered. Others suggested a variety of possibilities: “Angel?” “Adolescent?” “Asswipe?” and such.

  “Lord have mercy,” Willard said in disgust.

  It was Gypsy who offered “Axis?” and then the rest of us were saying, “Yeah!” and “That’s it!” and “She got it!”

  Ella Jean was the only one who was mindful of poor Sammy’s condition. She touched him gently on his chest near the burns and asked, “Does it hurt real bad? Maybe you ought to have Doc Swain look at that.”

  Sammy shook his head twice. Whatever pain he was still feeling was eased by Ella Jean’s touch and her solicitude. I would have gladly endured a branding like that to get her finger on my chest. Even though Sammy and I—same age, same size—had been rivals more than friends all our lives, I felt genuine compassion for him.

  “Aint you told your folks?” Ella Jean asked.

  “Heck naw,” Sammy said. “Paw would butcher ’em.”

  “They need to be butchered,” I declared.

  “But we don’t want nobody’s folks involved in this,” Willard said, reminding us of the long-standing policy that neither Allies nor Axis would ever inform any of the town’s adults—except possibly Miss Jerram—of any of our activities. Willard declared, “If the Allies ever get butchered, we’ll do it ourselfs.”

  “Then let’s do it!” I said, and had the rare satisfaction of hearing all the others second the motion.

  Chapter ten

  When Sammy had answered all our questions (e.g., Which one of the Allies had actually applied the branding tool? Sog Alan), the business of the meeting focused upon Sammy’s request to be permitted to return to the fold, to forswear his defection to the enemy, renounce his apostasy, and become an Axis again. “I’ll be both a Jap and a Nazi if you’ll let me come back,” he offered.