The Blue Star

by Tony Earley

  Dennis Deane looked a little frightened. He shrugged. “There are eight of ’em living down there. They gotta sit somewhere.”

  Ellie Something glared at Dennis Deane, then stomped her foot. Seconds later someone downstairs whacked the ceiling with a broom handle. She leaned over and stared angrily at the floor. “Ooh, you nasty old thing,” she whispered.

  “Ellie and Mrs. Tessnear get into it at least once a day,” Dennis Deane said. “They’re like two cats that way.”

  Ellie parked her fists on her hips. “Are you taking her side?” she asked.

  “Oh, Lord, no, honey. Of course not.”

  “I’m just trying to make us a home here, Dennis Deane, and I don’t have much to work with.”

  “I know you are, sweetheart, and I think you’re doing a good job.” He took the shirt down from the door of the chifforobe and rapidly began putting it on.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Me and Jim are gonna go for a walk. Wanna go for a walk, Jim?”

  “Sure,” Jim said. “I guess.” He set the food basket on the floor.

  “A walk?” Ellie Something said. “You’re going for a walk? These people are our guests, Dennis Deane. They just got here and they brought us presents.”

  “Oh, I think they should definitely go for a walk,” Mama said. “You see, our visit is kind of a surprise housewarming shower, and men would just get in the way.”

  “Absolutely,” Chrissie said. “They should leave.”

  “The only reason we brought Jim,” said Norma, “was because it was his car.”

  “And he didn’t even drive it,” Mama said.

  “A shower?” Ellie Something said. “You’re giving me a shower?” She covered her face with her hands and began to cry.

  “Shh,” Chrissie said, kissing Ellie Something on the hair and glaring dangerously at Dennis Deane.

  Dennis Deane looked helplessly to Mama, who winked at him and nodded toward the door. He stepped forward and placed his hand in the small of Ellie Something’s back. “Hey, little stuff,” he whispered. “Look at me.”

  “I don’t want to look at you.”

  “Well, I can’t say that I blame you there. I know I’m not the handsomest man in the world. But, if it makes you feel any better, I’m pretty sure I’m the handsomest man on Leila Street.”

  Jim saw Ellie Something’s cheeks rise behind her hands in the direction of a small smile. She peeked at Dennis Deane over the tips of her fingers.

  “We won’t be gone long,” he said.

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Ellie Something opened her hands and Dennis Deane leaned in and smooched her on the lips.

  We’re Married Now

  JIM AND Dennis Deane sat atop the large hump of granite protruding from the ground near the top of Mill Hill. Dennis Deane’s glasses were pushed up on his forehead, and his hands covered his eyes. Jim thought that Dennis Deane might be crying, so he didn’t look at him. He studied instead the names and dates and initials and hearts and curse words, some of them faded and ancient-looking, scratched on the cold gray skin of the rock. Because Jim didn’t recognize any of the names or initials, and the dates held no significance, the curse words seemed to rise above the babble of their surroundings and fly in his face — which left him feeling vaguely picked on. It was like being laughed at by strangers for no discernible reason.

  Below him, the houses of the village dropped toward the mill a terraced row at a time, trailing behind them backyards cluttered with coal piles and outhouses and roughly made chicken coops and recently turned garden spots; with fruit trees and beehives and small forests of tall poles blooming with purple martin houses made from painted gourds; with squat, black washtubs and clotheslines bobbing with gaunt families of dungarees and shirts and dresses and underwear. The houses didn’t vary in shape, but somehow no two yards looked alike, as if another town had exploded nearby and the debris from the explosion had fallen randomly from the sky. Allendale from the front proclaimed its toughness with a single rigid face, but from the back it revealed instead a collection of tired private faces that Jim didn’t think he was meant to see, particularly when a woman wearing little more than a slip appeared on one of the stoops and threw a pan of dishwater into the yard. Maybe that’s why the rock he was sitting on cursed at him every time he glanced at it: he wasn’t supposed to be here. He looked at his watch. He had been in Allendale less than half an hour and already wished he were somewhere else. He didn’t know how Dennis Deane stood it.

  Dennis Deane sniffed and drew his coat sleeve across his face and lowered his glasses onto his nose. “Ah, God, look at this place,” he said.

  “Do you know the names of the other streets?” Jim asked.

  Dennis Deane closed his eyes and pointed down the hill. “Esmerelda, Honoria, Virginia, Eugenia, Cecily, Leila, Elspeth, and Garland.”

  “Garland?”

  “The only boy. ‘A nineteen sixteen graduate of Yale University, he loved his God and his country, and on the cruel battlefields of France willingly offered the frail vessel of his earthly body as a sacrifice for the propagation of liberty, July nineteen eighteen.’”

  “Where did you read that?”

  “There’s a plaque beside the main gate. I walk by it every day.”

  “Does anybody still live in the big house?”

  “Just Elspeth. The rest of ’em moved back to New Hampshire when the Colonel died.”

  Set at the end of an avenue of walnut trees near the high school, its first story obscured by overgrown boxwoods, the big house had always looked haunted to Jim, although maybe its proximity to the ball field was what made it seem so scary.

  “Have you ever seen her?”

  “Who? Miss Allen? Nah. She only comes out at Christmas. Gives everybody a poke full of oranges. I’ll get mine next year, I guess. I didn’t get in the navy.”

  “You tried to enlist?”

  “They said I didn’t see good enough, not even with these handsome glasses.”

  “Where’d you get them?”

  “An eye doctor comes to the mill every three months. Are you going to join up?”

  “I already did,” Jim said. “Did the mill pay?”

  “Nah. They take it out of your check. Navy?”

  “Army. I go in the day after my birthday. In June.”

  “I still know when your birthday is. What did your mama say?”

  “I haven’t told her yet.”

  “Boy,” Dennis Deane said, “I wouldn’t want to be there for that conversation.”

  “Me, neither,” said Jim.

  Jim hadn’t wanted any part of the navy because there was nowhere to hide in the middle of the ocean. If the Japanese, or a U-boat, found your ship, you couldn’t do a thing about it. Pearl Harbor had proved that. And even if you managed to get off your ship before it sank, you might still be thousands of miles from land. What were you supposed to do then? Besides, Bucky had been in the navy, and as far as Jim was concerned, that was strike three right there. He kept Bucky’s letter from Pearl Harbor hidden in his underwear drawer. He didn’t know what to do with it. Throwing it away seemed sacrilegious somehow, but keeping it never let Jim forget that Bucky, even though he was dead, had won in the end.

  Jim had decided on the army during the train ride into New Carpenter the day he sneaked off to enlist. At least in the army there was a possibility you might get to fight in the woods, where Jim figured he would have a chance. The uncles said that country boys always made the best soldiers because they already knew how to hunt and shoot when they went in. Jim knew how to hunt and shoot. And if a squirrel couldn’t see him, as good as their eyes were, then, how could a German? City boys, the uncles said, were always the first ones to get shot. The trick was to not stand next to one. Jim hoped that when his time came to fight, the battle would be in the woods.

  “Who would you rather kill,” Dennis Deane asked, “a German or a Jap?”

  “I
would just as soon not kill anybody, Dennis Deane.”

  “Well, you’ve got one bullet. And there’s a kraut and a Jap running toward your foxhole. Who do you shoot?”

  “The German.”

  “How come?”

  “He’s probably bigger than the Jap. I figure, shoot the big guy and fight the little guy.”

  “But what if the Jap was meaner than the German?”

  “He would still be little.”

  “Man, if I could ever get out of this place, I’d love to go to the Philippines and kill me some Japs. I bet I could even shoot straight now. Have y’all been keeping up with it?”

  “It sounds bad on the radio,” Jim said, “but the uncles say that ol’ MacArthur’s going to be hard to whip.”

  “They’re all screwed. Even ol’ MacArthur.”

  Jim felt he should probably argue the point about MacArthur — the uncles would have — but deep down he agreed with it. He didn’t see how anybody was going to stop the Japanese, so he let it go.

  “Are you scared?” Dennis Deane asked.

  “Some, I guess.”

  “Have you told Chrissie?”

  “I doubt she would care,” Jim said.

  “You might be right about that. She and Ellie write letters back and forth, and apparently you did something to make Pocahontas awful mad.”

  “I told you not to call her that. What did she say I did?”

  “I don’t really know. Ellie won’t say. She says girl stuff is private, and I’m inclined to agree with her. I know way more about girl stuff than anybody ought to.”

  “Do you like being married?”

  Dennis Deane swallowed, then pushed his glasses up and covered his eyes.

  “Are you crying?”

  “Go to hell.”

  Jim looked at his watch again. Then he listened to it tick. He could feel the curse words on the rock trying to get his attention. He studied the purple martin houses down in the village to see if any birds came out of them. His butt felt frozen.

  “I’m just tired, is all, Jim. Ellie cries all the time because she misses her mama, and her mama won’t come see Ellie because Ellie got pregnant. My mama comes to see us all the time and starts crying as soon as she walks in the door. I don’t really recommend knocking up a fourteen-year-old, Jim. It just causes trouble.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  “The only real good thing about being married is that we get to do it whenever we want to.”

  “Really?” Jim said. “You can do it with a pregnant girl?”

  “Oh, boy. Are you kidding me? That’s all pregnant girls want to do. They’re like daggum wildcats. Ellie likes to do it late at night when all the Tessnear boys are on third. It makes the bed squeak and drives the old woman crazy. Did you know your face was red?”

  “Now you go to hell,” Jim said.

  “We’ll take that trip together,” said Dennis Deane.

  “Well, we’ve got a good start.”

  “But first you’ve got to promise me you won’t ever tell anybody I talked about Ellie like that. We’re married now.”

  Jim still felt a little squeamish about the idea of doing it with a pregnant girl and couldn’t imagine who he would tell, anyway. “I promise,” he said. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Tell me about Bucky’s funeral. I heard there were two or three thousand people up there.”

  “There were more people up there than at the Christmas parade in New Carpenter, if you can believe that. Cars were backed up from the Bucklaws all the way down to Penn’s house. They made Bucky out to be some kind of big war hero.”

  “Well, you know, Jim, Bucky is kind of a big war hero.”

  “He was on a ship and somebody blew it up,” Jim said. “How does that make him a hero?”

  Dennis Deane whistled and looked away. “Daggum, Jim,” he said.

  Jim searched out and stared at the nearest curse word. He had it coming. “I know,” he said. “I’ve got to do better. Please don’t tell anybody I said that.”

  “I won’t, but, boy, I can’t believe you still hate him that much. I mean, he ain’t coming home.”

  “He might as well be. He wrote me a letter right before he died and told me to stay away from Chrissie.”

  Dennis Deane laughed. “Some people ain’t even nice when they’re dead, are they? What time you got?”

  “Ten ’til three.”

  “We need to go before long. I gotta be at work at four.”

  “What do you do in the mill?”

  “I’m a sweeper.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I sweep. You see the third floor? That’s what I sweep, every night, from one end to the other.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “It’s the worst job in the mill. The broom’s four feet wide and it weighs a ton and it just kills my elbows. They only make dumbasses and people they want to run off do it.”

  “Which one are you?”

  “I’m a dumbass. Ernest Tessnear is the one they’re trying to run off.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I’m not sure. He says they got tired of him not kissing people’s butts. He used to be the guard in the gatehouse on first shift. Now he’s a sweeper on third shift. And they made all his brothers work third, too. It looks like they’re trying to run the whole crowd off. At least they gave me second.”

  “Why didn’t they just fire Ernest?”

  “They think they’re teaching the rest of us a lesson. They’re gonna wind up with a union in here if they ain’t careful.”

  “Why does the old woman hate y’all so much?”

  “They used to have the whole house. The boss man moved us in after they got mad at Ernest. We’re on the waiting list to get our own house, but it might take a while.”

  “Why don’t the Tessnears just quit?”

  “I don’t know. The whole gang tried joining the navy when they made Ernest a sweeper, but none of ’em could get in. They’re all deaf from working in the mill. Me, I stick spit wads in my ears.”

  He stood up.

  “Jim, do you remember all those times when we were in school and I acted stupid?”

  “That would be hard to forget, Dennis Deane.”

  “Well, I just want you to know that I knew I was acting stupid. It doesn’t really count as stupid when you know. Deep down, I’m actually pretty smart. I just tried to keep it a secret.”

  “Everybody suspects that, except maybe the teachers. I think you fooled them pretty good.”

  “I knew that one day I’d have to stop acting stupid and go to work and get married and all that stuff, but damn, Jim, I didn’t figure it would happen this soon.”

  “It happens to everybody, Dennis Deane. It happens to me in June.”

  “Then we must have done something wrong. I ought to have some stupid time left. I ain’t even grown up yet. Hey, can you hear that?”

  The breeze had quieted for the moment, and in the lull Jim heard the faint hammering clack of the looms inside the mill. From a distance it sounded like cicadas, or banjos playing something fast, a rain shower coming across a cornfield, something other than what it was. He couldn’t believe it was audible from so far away.

  “Do you know what we’re making down there?”

  Jim shook his head.

  “Khaki twill. Miles and miles of it. That’s all we’re running. Three shifts, seven days a week.”

  “For uniforms,” Jim said.

  “Yep.” Dennis Deane hopped down off the rock.

  “Hey, y’all might make the cloth for my uniform. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  “‘Y’all might make the cloth for my uniform,’” Dennis Deane said in a whiny voice. “‘Wouldn’t that be something?’”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you all of a sudden?”

  “There ain’t nothing the matter with me,” said Dennis Deane. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  Mar
ch 14, 1942

  New Carpenter, North Carolina

  Dear Elizabeth,

  Regarding your recent letter, I must take exception. Although I understand your position as the mother of an only son, I don’t appreciate being taken to task for doing my duty. You should know me well enough to know that I would never certify any young man as unhealthy when he is as healthy as Jim is, no matter how long I’ve known his family. It’s no easy thing approving any mother’s son for military service, particularly when those sons are heading off to a war that’s shaping up to be as bloody as this one appears it’s going to be, and I don’t take the responsibility lightly. Don’t forget that I brought most of those boys into the world, Jim included! Please know that I will pray for him as I pray for all the others. Unfortunately, that’s the best I can do. Be proud of Jim for wanting to serve his country. Don’t blame me because you raised him properly!

  Sincerely yours,

  Theodore Burch Twitty, M.D.

  p.s. It’s been a while since I saw you last. Come on in when you’re through being mad at me and we’ll have a look at you.

  “Heroes of Mathematics”

  by

  Norma Harris

  MR. DUNLAP, beloved faculty, family, and friends of the class of 1942, I stand before you tonight not as one who has arrived at a destination, but as one resting momentarily, as at an oasis, at the beginning of a much longer journey. Although we have on this day completed our long march through the difficult grades of elementary and high school, we are also fully aware that we have simultaneously arrived at a point of embarkation beyond which lie the disparate roads that will carry us to our respective destinies. For those of us whose destinies lead us away from our small, but beloved, home, we pray that those same roads will someday lead us back again, back to those of you who have selflessly loved and raised and taught us, equipping us for our journeys. We are also fully aware that, because of the great struggle in which our nation is now engaged, the days of travel ahead will be for many of us fraught with danger and hardship, and that all of us will be asked to make sacrifices greater than we think we can bear. [DON’T LOOK AT J!] Two of our number, Buster Burnette and Horace Gentine, have already heeded the call to arms, and others will no doubt soon follow in their brave footsteps, and, lest we forget, those of us who remain behind will also be asked to make contributions no less important. We, the Aliceville School class of 1942, wish to assure you on this occasion that with God’s help we are ready to do our respective duties, be they here or on some desolate foreign shore.