American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “Only in your dreams, Vince. The whole thing is ludicrous. Asking teachers to promise that they won’t advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government—it’s an insult.”

  “And yet,” said Grimm, with a lugubrious expression that well suited his name, “at least five of the nine of you went along with this. I’d be interested to know which of the longstanding members of the board were persuaded that this oath was in the best interest of the school.”

  No one spoke. The vote had been taken by secret ballot, and so the secrecy would remain…for a while at least.

  The board broke for lunch. Afterward came the presentation of a special program of student music performance, recitation, and declamation in the school’s auditorium. It was thought best by Superintendent Grimm and the school’s twelfth-grade English teacher, Miss Greene (and at the very last minute), to remove from the program Danny Worley’s five-minute oration, “Jesus, the Original Liberal.” There followed a tour of improvements to the campus, which was led by the deans of boys and girls and assisted by the dormitory supervisors. The tour was mapped so that by its end, the board would have had an opportunity to visit with nearly every one of the school’s adult employees, as well as make passing acquaintance with a good number of its most promising students.

  Superintendent Grimm, who was supposed to go along with the tour, delegated the responsibility to his second-in-command, Director Rainwater. Grimm sat in his office with the Reverend Claxton, the two discussing whether or not to mount a protest against the loyalty oath. Such a protest might do little good and could only alienate the three new members of the board, each of whom had won his seat due to generous (and ongoing) financial contributions to the school. Future donations might very well be imperiled by administration contumacy.

  “There are members of this faculty who will refuse to sign it,” said the pastor. “I can name four right off the bat. I assume you’ll have to terminate them. It’s going to get very messy, Tim.”

  “I know,” said Grimm. “Here’s the rock and there’s the hard place. I got spoiled, Howard. All those years of minimal oversight. Occasionally we screwed up, but what got broken we fixed, and in some ways we even made it better than it was before. It’s not easy, as the board certainly knows, shepherding all these kids twenty-four hours a day, nine months a year—not only teaching them but feeding them, keeping them healthy and safe, tucking them sometimes literally into bed at night. The parents of these kids have always put a great amount of trust in us because they know how committed we are to this school. Most of them could not care less whether we’ve ever entertained thoughts of insurrection against this government. They just want their children to grow up to be decent adults, good citizens who love this country but aren’t afraid from time to time to point out ways in which she could improve herself. I wish I knew who those board members are—the ones Sprawley got to. I thought I knew the old timers better than that.”

  “I can tell you who they are,” said Miss Taylor. Sharon Taylor was Grimm’s secretary. Because everyone at the school shouldered multiple responsibilities, she was also dorm mother to the sophomore girls. “They asked me to count the votes. I don’t mind spilling the beans. I hate the whole idea of a loyalty oath. I had an older brother who died in the Battle of Okinawa. I have another brother who was injured at Inchon. Swearing an oath presumes you aren’t patriotic to begin with. It galls me. I almost altered the votes on a couple of the ballots. But I knew that God was watching.”

  Miss Taylor shared a smile of spiritual affinity with the Reverend Claxton.

  “Anyway,” she concluded, “it was Dorrell and Cummings.”

  Grimm nodded. “Just those two. That’s good news, at least. Dorrell I suspected. His heart hasn’t really been in this school since his wife died a couple of years ago. I can see how he might go that way. Cummings is a surprise. You’re sure it was Augie who went along with Sprawley and the others?”

  Sharon was about to explain that she easily recognized Augie’s blocky handwriting when a new voice—a deep and cavernous voice—entered the conversation: “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

  This from Augie Cummings in the flesh—a large, burly, ham-fisted sheep rancher in his fifties. Augie was the only board member who lived in Sanpete County (earning his seat because of his militant Gentile status: he was an outspoken Baptist in an overwhelmingly Mormon county). Augie had been listening outside a door that Sharon had inadvertently left slightly ajar. Now the door was open and Augie had stepped fully into the room.

  “And you’re aware, Miss Taylor,” he appended, “that what you just did could result in your dismissal from this school.”

  “I would fight that effort tooth and nail, Cummings,” responded Grimm.

  “Do you want me to leave the room, Tim?” asked Sharon.

  “No. Stay. Sit. Augie, I don’t get it. By your single vote you’ve put me and the rest of this school in a terrible fix. I don’t understand how you could go along with it. Your politics have never run toward platitudinous spread-eagleism.”

  “The school’s getting a reputation, Tim. I happen to like what you’re doing here, but perception is changing: we’re not just some college-prep boarding school for the kids of boondock ranchers and National Park rangers anymore. The word now is that Sanpitch is becoming a lefty school—like one of those Greenwich Village little Red schoolhouses. Look, I hauled myself thirty miles across the county to cast my vote for Adlai Stevenson both times, even though I knew that he didn’t have a prayer when it came to winning this state, so don’t question my own progressive credentials. But the Westerners who send their kids here—they may be a live-and-let-live bunch, but they aren’t Wobblies, and if Sanpitch starts to get known as the place where Rocky Mountain Reds board their Marxist brood, the other parents—the kind who’ve been the backbone of this school from the beginning—they’re gonna start yanking their sons and daughters right out of here. This loyalty oath is going to make a lot of those parents feel better.”

  “What happens to my teachers—the ones who won’t sign?”

  “Well, you’ll just have to make them sign, Tim. You have to explain to them why it’s important for them to swallow their pride and do what in the end is really the best thing for the school.”

  “Can you at least get the second sentence taken out?”

  Cummings nodded. “I think I could even get Dorell to go along with it.”

  Grimm thought for a moment. “So I really have no other choice, do I?” This question was posed to his friend, the Reverend Claxton.

  “To be human is to compromise, Tim. Only Jesus Christ was allowed to stick unwaveringly to his principles.”

  “I think,” interjected Cummings, “that you’ll be surprised how few of your teachers would be willing to sacrifice their jobs for a principle.”

  “Or how many would choose to stay simply because of their affinity for you, Tim.” The reverend was smiling warmly at his friend.

  In the end, after much handwringing and soul-searching, only one teacher refused to sign the contract, which was tantamount to agreeing to the loyalty oath. It was Mr. Gage, who taught junior high mathematics. The fact that in the end he was the only one to object to the point of taking a hard stand came as a surprise to both Superintendent Grimm and to his right-hand men, the Reverend Claxton and Director Rainwater, in spite of what had been speculated on board review day. Grimm decided to talk to Gage. He could always be called upon to speak his mind and he had a reputation for not holding back, regardless of the circumstances.

  “It isn’t what you think at all, Tim,” said Gage, as the two men strolled through the darkened campus on the night before the students would be released for their much-anticipated winter break. “I’m almost sixty. I’ve spent nearly two-thirds of my life as a teacher here at Sanpitch. Excepting service in the military, there is no other job in this country that demands as much of one’s time and attention as being a boarding school teacher. Right now as we’re walking and talking
I’m wondering in the back of my mind if my eighth-grade boys are really all asleep or have a few of them stolen down to the common room to trade Lash LaRue comic books and watch John Wayne on the late show. And this being the last night in this term, I have a mind to be intentionally negligent and creep right off to bed without checking on them.”

  Harley Gage chuckled over the recklessness of his contemplated dereliction.

  “Lookit, Tim—I wake up in the morning thinking about these boys, about all of our kids, and I go to bed at night praying that they get all the good breaks when they grow up and leave this place. This school has been my life and I’ve been quite blessed. It is all that I’ve had and all that I’ve ever wanted—to make some kind of small difference in these youngsters’ lives. I do hate sometimes the direction this country is headed, but I know that we’re raising kids who will be equipped to help make it better.

  “Do I advocate the overthrow of this government by force or other unlawful means? What a question! And how terribly inconsequential when set beside those things that really do matter. But it’s important for at least one of us to send a message on behalf of all of the rest of us.”

  Men in 1957 rarely showed the kind of physical affection that would come so much easier to their grandsons over fifty years later. But on that night, beneath a spangled late autumn sky in the Sanpete Valley of central Utah, two men shook hands in a way that more-than-adequately expressed the strength and solidity of their friendship—a friendship cemented by serious shared purpose. And John Wayne, with Mr. Gage’s blessing, fought the outlaws and the Apaches into the wee hours of the morning with no small number of rapt eighth-grade boys as witnesses.

  1958

  EXPLOSIVE IN SOUTH CAROLINA

  2212, 03/12/58

  Doris Daltry makes her husband Air Force Lieutenant Kenneth Daltry a Scotch and soda. It’s late. He’s tired. He’s also jittery and needs to relax.

  “Did you collect all the pieces?” asks Doris, massaging her husband’s tight shoulders through his t-shirt.

  “By the hardest. There was one little boy who really dug in his heels—wouldn’t give up any of what he’d found. His father really had to work on him. Pretty uncomfortable situation. The kid’s crying, the mother’s standing there giving me the evil eye.” Kenneth groans at the memory. Then he moans, this time with pleasure. “Ah, that knot right there. Really dig in, honey.”

  As Doris kneads harder, she asks, “Have they finished combing the area?”

  Kenneth shakes his head. “They’ll be going over it for a week at least.”

  “Remember what I said to you on Monday morning?”

  “Something about a nightmare you’d had the night before. Hiroshima. I’d told you Sunday night to put Hersey’s book down and stop reading it right before you went to bed.”

  “And I asked you that next morning—”

  “Not if anyone could ever drop a bomb on us, but whether we might ever accidentally drop a bomb on ourselves.”

  Kenneth turns around and kisses his wife. “In light of yesterday’s atomic bomb mishap, I’d say your question was a pretty timely one.”

  BEFORE THAT:

  1724, 03/12/58

  Lieutenant Daltry is sitting in the living room of Mr. and Mrs. Caleb Flowers. Caleb Junior is crying.

  “Caleb,” says Caleb Senior, sternly, “go and get your atomic bomb fragments and give them to Lieutenant Daltry. They aren’t yours to keep.”

  “The other kids got to keep theirs.”

  “I’m afraid that isn’t true, Caleb,” says Daltry, the fatigue of the long afternoon beginning to wear on his even-tempered, spit-and-polish military mien. “I’ve visited the homes of all of your friends and they’ve turned over everything they have. You’re the last one on my list.”

  “Molly Greaney said she was going to make an ashtray out of the piece she found.”

  “Well, that would be a little hard now, son.”

  “As if the Greaneys need another ashtray in that house,” opines Mrs. Flowers with puckered, judgmental lips. “That den of theirs is like an ashtray museum.”

  “Go and get the pieces of the bomb you found,” says Mr. Flowers. “Give them to the lieutenant so he can go home. He has a long drive ahead of him. You have a long drive back to Savannah, am I right, Lieutenant? Be a good patriot, son.”

  As the boy goes reluctantly and with residual sniffles to bring his bag of shiny metallic shrapnel from the Mark 6 30-kiloton bomb that was accidentally dropped on his neighborhood only the day before, Mrs. Flowers sighs and says, “I was reading the book Hiroshima, which I checked out of the library last week. I was wondering if someday a bomb might be dropped on us! ”

  “By accident?” asks her husband.

  “No. On purpose. I would never have believed that a bomb could be dropped by accident.”

  BEFORE THAT:

  2152, 3/11/58

  Lieutenant Daltry receives orders to drive to Mars Bluff and assist in securing the area. There have been reports that children who live near the blast have been taking fragments of the bomb home as souvenirs. It will be his job to see that all fragments are collected, even if this means going door to door to confiscate them.

  Daltry asks his commanding officer if it has been established that the area is free of radiation contamination. He is told that nothing has registered beyond the level of normal background radioactivity.

  Daltry sighs with relief. Just the morning before, his wife had related the horrors of radiation poisoning that she had read about in Hiroshima by John Hersey.

  BEFORE THAT:

  1618, 3/11/58

  Bill Gregg is out in his workshop building a bench with his son. His wife Effie is in the house, sewing. Their two daughters and the couple’s young niece are playing in the yard. Bill hears a plane overhead, then seconds later the detonation of a 7,600-pound bomb right in his back acreage. The concussion makes his ears ring. The walls of the workshop shake. The air becomes a maelstrom of dust and smoke. He runs out into the yard to search for the rest of his family. Huge clods of earth hurled high into the air from the bomb’s impact with the ground start their raining descent. One-hundred, two-hundred-pound soil boulders come crashing down on the house. Smaller chunks pelt the girls as they run and scream in terror. A gash is ripped in Bill’s side; large plaster patches from the house walls come crashing down on Effie.

  A mushroom cloud rises up from the instantaneous crater—a crater that measures seventy-five feet wide and thirty feet deep. Several nearby homes and a church are struck by the falling debris. A state trooper, forced off the highway by the blast, shields his head as he rushes to the scene.

  The bomb carries no fissionable material. This is not a poisonous mushroom cloud. The bomb is atomic in name only, but the TNT that provides its explosive charge wreaks havoc nevertheless. The Greggs, all of whom survive, find that several of their free-range chickens have been vaporized.

  BEFORE THAT:

  1616, 03/11/58

  Co-pilot Charles Woodruff is having trouble with his bomb’s locking pin. Unlocked by regulation mandate during takeoff, the bomb must now be secured. The B-47’s commander, Captain Earl Koehler, suggests that the bombardier, Captain Bruce Kulka, try to seat the locking pin by hand. Because the bomb bay isn’t pressurized and the plane’s altimeter now reads fifteen thousand feet, the three crew members must strap on their oxygen masks.

  The entrance to the bomb bay is too small to allow for both a man and his parachute, so Kulka goes into the bay without it.

  Kulka can’t find the locking pin in the bomb-release mechanism. After twelve minutes of fruitless searching, the bombardier pulls himself high up in the bomb bay, where he thinks the pin might be hiding behind the bomb. Unfortunately, he uses the emergency bomb-release mechanism for his handhold. The bomb drops from its shackle. For a brief moment, it and Captain Kulka come to rest together on the bomb bay doors, Kulka straddling the bomb like a rider on a bareback horse. The enormous weight of the bomb fo
rces the doors open. Kulka grabs hold of something—he doesn’t know what—which keeps him from plummeting earthward with the bomb.

  Hunter Air Force base doesn’t understand the coded message the crew sends. Captain Koehler is forced to radio the civilian airport in Florence to ask that they communicate to Hunter the fact that they have lost a “device.”

  BEFORE THAT:

  0800, 03/11/58

  A specialized loading crew consisting of two men work for one hour and seven minutes to implant a bomb in Aircraft 53-1876A. The bulbous, blimp-shaped weapon bears a strong resemblance to the infamous Fat Man that was detonated 1,800 feet above Nagasaki, Japan, a dozen years earlier. The plane is scheduled to participate in “Operation Snow Flurry,” part of an important “Unit Simulated Combat Mission and Special Weapons Exercise” programmed for later that day. The purpose of the mission, in which the plane would be accompanied by three other B-47s from the 375th Bombardment Squadron, is to transport a nuclear bomb to Bruntingthorpe Air Base in Great Britain and pretend to release it somewhere over that country.

  The loading team has trouble with the bomb’s steel locking pin. They ask the weapons-release systems supervisor for help. He has the weapon removed from its shackle and put into a sling. Then he futzes around the pin with a hammer until it’s seated. The bomb is returned to its shackle. The two crewmen decide not to take the locking pin through its engage/disengage cycle; time is running out. They have to be finished by 1000 hours.

  BEFORE THAT:

  0715, 03/10/58

  Lieutenant Kenneth Daltry and his wife Doris have finished breakfast. Each is indulging in a second cup of coffee before Daltry has to drive to Hunter Air Force Base for the day. Doris mentions the nightmare she had the night before.

  “I wish you wouldn’t read that Hiroshima book before you go to bed.”

  “I was thinking about that midair collision last month, Ken. The plane was carrying a nuclear bomb. They dropped it in the water, but what if it had hit Savannah?”