The Blue Star

by Tony Earley

  It seems like only yesterday that as a little girl I stood at the bottom of this very hill and watched this great hall of learning rise from the earth. At the time it seemed to me a miracle that such a gigantic building should suddenly appear in my tiny world. Today, however, armed with the education I received here, I look around this auditorium and think instead of the skill and knowledge necessary to make possible the construction that so dazzled my young eyes. From the architect who designed the building to the lowliest laborer, the individual abilities of each person involved were crucial to the building’s successful completion, just as the individual abilities of each of us will prove crucial to our nation’s efforts in the struggles ahead. It was the great Greek mathematician Pythagoras who said almost six hundred years before the birth of Christ that “all is number,” meaning that the great truths of Creation can be reduced to mathematical absolutes. While Christ Himself proved Pythagoras’s theory to be in error, I think we can now more accurately state that “much is number.” I ask you now to gaze up at the majestic height of the ceiling above us and to note the great distance between its supporting walls. [GESTURE.] It seems impossible that the ceiling does not fall in upon us, yet it does not fall! We sit here tonight secure beneath it only because men who fully grasped that “much is number” used their considerable mathematical skills to build it in such a way that it would not fall. It was mathematicians such as Pythagoras and Euclid, the father of geometry, and Sir Isaac Newton, the inventor of calculus and discoverer of gravity, whose mathematical truths hold up the roof over our heads just as the democratic ideals of great leaders such as Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln support the enduring edifice of our republic. It was President Lincoln who said that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” and tonight we sit in this magnificent, undivided house of learning as citizens of an undivided nation, each of us one of a greater number committed to the preservation of freedom and liberty.

  While the memories of the peaceful world in which we lived prior to December seventh remain vivid in our minds, I ask you to imagine another nation at peace, the ancient kingdom of Syracuse, on the isle of Sicily, in the year 213 B.C. In Syracuse at that time, there lived a mathematician and engineer named Archimedes. Archimedes was a peaceful man who was never happier than when solving a complicated equation or making a difficult proof. It was he who once leapt from his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting, “Eureka! I’ve got it!” when he finally figured out the solution to a particularly vexing problem — much to the surprise of his startled neighbors, I’m sure! It was also he who, while out for a stroll one day, gazed out to sea and spied the deadly warships of the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus approaching Syracuse under full sail! The Romans had come to invade and enslave the city in the name of the emperor! Though he was a peaceful man, Archimedes decided at that moment to use his mathematical skills to help defend his beloved city against the overwhelming might of the Roman invaders. First, using the laws of optics, he constructed great mirrors of bronze to reflect the blinding rays of the sun into the harbor and to set fire to the Roman ships that dared venture too close to shore. Later, after the Romans gained landfall, he invented great machines of war to defend the walls of the city against the relentless siege of the irrepressible legions. And when the Romans finally breached the walls and sacked the city, a legionnaire came upon Archimedes scratching one final problem into the sand with a stick, no doubt an equation he would use to invent yet another machine to help his countrymen. Archimedes didn’t even look up from his work as the legionnaire drew his bloody sword and cut off the peaceful mathematician’s head. It was Archimedes who said, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the world.” Though we did not ask for the responsibility, we, the class of 1942, have by circumstance and necessity been asked to take up the lever before us and move the world. You, beloved parents and teachers, have given us a secure foundation, a place on which to stand. Though we are but inexperienced youths, we understand that while we may not yet feel ready to move the world, move it we must, from the regions of darkness into which it has fallen, back into the light of freedom and peace. In generations to come, history will judge us by how we responded when our nation called upon us. So years from now, when the day of judgment is at hand, let it be said that when the sails of our enemies appeared in our harbor, we set to work and directed the glorious rays of the sun back upon them! Though we long for peace, let us build great machines of war, and build them well, if that is what we must do.

  Already we have lost one of our own to our dishonorable and inscrutable enemy, one who as a member of the class of 1941 sat in this very room just a year ago, filled with his own hopes and dreams for the future. No one here on that night, myself included, would have dared imagine that because of treachery already under way on the far side of the globe this young man in the prime of his life had but little more than half a year to live. Let it be known that the class of 1942 has voted to honor Arthur Bucklaw Jr. by leaving the seat he occupied last year vacant, and I now draw your attention to it. [PAUSE. GESTURE.] As we remember Bucky, I would like to close with the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln, who offered these sentiments during the dedication of the National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863, following another dark moment in our nation’s history. Though perhaps familiar, they have never been more apt: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

  Thank you and may God in His infinite mercy bless us all.

  Injun Joe

  EARLY IN the evening Jim walked around the hotel and let himself in through the back gate. A dozen or so hens fussed over a yellow stripe of corn strewn from the porch, and he watched where he put his good shoes as he crossed the dirt yard. He still wore the black gown in which he had graduated — although he had left the cap at home — and he felt awkward and somber and ministerial and grown-up as he climbed the steps. When he peered through the screen he saw Chrissie seated at the enamel-topped table in the center of the dim kitchen, her hands crossed in front of her, her face tilted toward the small window above the stove. He watched her for as long as he dared before he tapped at the door. In the soft, slanted failing light she had seemed as beautiful as the Virgin Mary listening to the call of the Lord on a slick page in an old Bible, but as she turned toward him, her face lengthened and her hair dulled and dusky circles appeared beneath her eyes. The woman who stared back from the other side of the screen wasn’t Chrissie at all, and the picture she occupied became almost too sad to contemplate.

  “Come on in the house,” Mrs. Steppe said.

  “Thank you,” said Jim. He still felt startled as he crossed the threshold and eased the door closed behind him.

  “I figured you might be the first one to show up.”

  Jim didn’t know what she meant by that, so he stood there and watched Mrs. Steppe watch him. He wished he had taken off the gown; and the necktie; and the shiny shoes. He wished he weren’t holding a bottle of perfume wrapped in lilac-scented paper. He wished he were sitting on the porch at home with Mama and the uncles, watching people drive away from graduation. Uncle Coran or Uncle Al would say, “Good crowd this year,” and Uncle Zeno would say, “Yep.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by that,” she said.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I just figured that you would come on by when you heard. You’ve always seemed to me like you’d be that kind of boy.”

  Jim wasn’t sure what kind of boy that was, so he smiled and looked down at the package. He had been careful not to mash the bow.

  “Y’all did hear about it over t
here, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “We heard. I’m awfully sorry about Mr. Steppe.”

  “Yeah, well, Joe. It’s been coming a long time, I guess, but it’s nice of you to say that. Do you want to sit down a minute?” She placed her palms flat against the table and looked around the kitchen as if a new workday had sneaked up on her and had to be immediately subdued. “I’ve got half a pot of coffee left over from supper. Would you like a cup? It’s still warm. We got an electric pot in the dining room, the hotel does.”

  Jim didn’t particularly like coffee, but he was a high school graduate now, offering words of comfort to a woman whose husband had just died. By his reckoning this was the first purely adult situation he would handle on his own — an Uncle Zeno kind of situation — and coffee drinking seemed called for.

  “Coffee sounds good about now,” he said. “Thanks.” He drew the chair at the end of the table and sat with his back to the door.

  “How do you take it?”

  Jim preferred that his coffee come with enough cream and sugar in it to make it stop tasting like coffee, but he answered, “Black.” That’s how he would have to drink it once he was a soldier. He pictured himself squatting around a campfire with other soldiers, drinking bitter black coffee from a tin cup. He hoped one of the other soldiers was his buddy. It would be good to have a buddy in the war. He wondered if it would be safe to sit around a campfire. Would the Germans see the smoke?

  “Here we go,” Mrs. Steppe said.

  The coffee smelled better than he had imagined. The steam rising from the cup curled into the light falling through the window, and it seemed important to Jim that the steam climbing through the light be noticed, so he noticed it. Outside the window, the evening had begun to dim toward twilight, although the sun wasn’t quite down. A chimney swift dove crazily across the small square of sky, and the bird’s pale shadow blinked almost invisibly on the white tabletop and was gone. Jim noted that he saw both the bird and its shadow in the same instant, and that seemed important, too. He wrapped both hands around the cup and felt the heat creep up his forearms. The attendant beauty and sadness of the world suddenly seemed to him available for pondering in a way they never had before. He felt as though he had spent his life until this evening poised over an exam, waiting for the teacher to say, “Begin.” Now he had begun. He took a slow sip of coffee but found that it tasted as bad as he had thought it would.

  “You sure you don’t want cream and sugar?” Mrs. Steppe asked. “I can get you some. It’s no trouble.”

  “No. No, thank you,” Jim said, placing the cup down on the saucer. Maybe the coffee would taste better once it cooled down a little. “This is good.”

  “I suppose I’ll drink me a cup,” Mrs. Steppe said. “It’s not as hot in here as it was.” When she returned to the table, she nodded toward the door standing slightly ajar across the room. “I guess you came by to see Chrissie, but she doesn’t feel like receiving visitors this evening.”

  “No, ma’am. I understand,” Jim said, eyeing the sliver of shadow visible through the crack in the doorway. “How’s she doing?”

  “Ah, about like you’d expect. That little girl sure loved her daddy. And he was good to her, in his way. I have to give him that, even now.”

  “And how are you doing?”

  Mrs. Steppe’s face dipped toward the tabletop. She seemed to be studying her hands. Some seconds passed before Jim noticed a tear flare in the light along her jawline and drop from the end of her chin.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean —”

  She held up her palm and cut him off. She leaned down and dabbed the corners of her eyes with her apron.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I just act a little stupid when people ask me how I am. I guess I’m not used to it. So, tell me, how was graduation?”

  “It was nice,” Jim said. “Norma gave a good speech.” He instantly regretted mentioning Norma and hoped Chrissie hadn’t heard. “It got hot in the auditorium before it was over, but we got through it.”

  Mrs. Steppe shook her head. “Joe, I swear to God,” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “All that girl has ever wanted to do was be in school and be like everybody else and go to the dances and march down the aisle and get her diploma, and he figured out how to mess that up, too.”

  Jim sipped his coffee. It didn’t taste any better.

  “And I just can’t believe that he was trying to come to her graduation,” she said, her voice rising. “Did he think he could just march in big as life and sit down in the auditorium and nobody would notice him? Did he think he wouldn’t get us in a world of trouble by pulling a stunt like that? Did he think we were going to up and go off with him, and him running from the law?” She picked up her coffee cup, then sat it back down in the saucer. “I give up,” she said. “I don’t know what he was thinking, and I don’t guess I ever did.”

  Jim sneaked another look at the door.

  “I think she’s asleep,” Mrs. Steppe said. “And she’s heard it all before, anyway. I know I’m bad to get mad and wear Joe out. I don’t guess I should, not in front of her, but I do. Most of the time I don’t have anybody else to listen to it.”

  Jim began to sweat underneath his graduation gown. He wondered if he would spend the rest of his adult life not knowing what to say. If this was an exam, he wasn’t doing very well at it.

  “What did y’all hear about it over at your house?” Mrs. Steppe asked.

  “We just heard that Mr. Steppe got killed in a car wreck. In South Carolina.”

  “In Chesnee,” she said. “He was headed this way sure as the world. Were people talking about it up at the school?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jim said. “A little.”

  “I just bet they were.”

  “Nobody really knew anything, though. There wasn’t much they could say.”

  “Did you know he was in a stolen car? Did y’all hear that? Were people talking about that up at the schoolhouse?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I swear to God. That man. Stolen car. And it was a Packard, for goodness’ sakes, like nobody on the road would notice an Indian driving a Packard.”

  “Were the police chasing him?”

  “Not this time. He just ran off the road and crashed into a tree. They said he probably went to sleep. Ain’t that something? Went to sleep and ruined somebody’s Packard.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He never could do anything right.”

  Jim didn’t know if he was supposed to affirm the remark or challenge it out of respect for the dead. So he sat very still.

  “Maybe I can finally get me some sleep now, though. I figured all along he was going to come back this way. Every time I closed my eyes I dreamed he was looking in the window.”

  “Why were you afraid of him?” Jim asked before he thought. “Y’all were married.”

  Mrs. Steppe studied him, a slight frown of concentration and disapproval on her face. He had seen Chrissie look at him like that, and he was disappointed in himself that he apparently deserved it so often.

  “You think married people don’t get afraid of each other?” she asked.

  Jim scratched at a small nick in his saucer. He had gotten that one wrong for sure. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess not. I haven’t spent a lot of time around married people, I mean living with married people, so I can’t say.”

  “Joe had a temper on him,” Mrs. Steppe said.

  Her tone and frown suggested that her answer contained everything Jim needed to know. He didn’t know exactly what that was, of course, but maybe he could come back to it and figure it out later.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “You know he robbed a bank.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You know how come?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She paused.

  “There was this ranch for sale near where we lived in Oklahoma, but really wh
at it was, was a dustbowl. Every time the wind blew, half of it wound up in Arkansas. Barns rotten, house falling in. You should’ve seen it. Anyway, one night Joe had a dream that the place had oil on it. He said he could see it underneath the ground, a whole lake of it, and he knew just where it was, and the dream was so vivid, he was convinced about it when he woke up. Absolutely convinced. I couldn’t talk him down. He got like that sometimes. The only problem with his plan, of course, was that he didn’t have any money to buy the ranch. Come to think of it, not having any money was always the problem with Joe’s plans.”

  “So he robbed a bank?”

  “That’s what he came up with, yes. We didn’t know none of this at the time, but he was going to rob a bank and buy that ranch and be the Cherokee oil king of Oklahoma. The bank he finally picked out was way out west somewhere, and the county it was in just had one bank and one cop. So who do you guess walked in while Joe was robbing that one bank?”

  “That one cop?”

  “The very one. Who naturally pulled out his gun and shot at Joe and hit the teller. Joe shot at the cop and managed to hit him in the foot. I know Joe wanted to kill him, but he couldn’t even get that part right. Joe always did have bad luck with policemen.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The poor teller, he died, and the cop got crippled. Joe ran out the door, and we didn’t hear from him again. That broke Chrissie’s heart more than anything. Then, late one night, after they figured out it was Joe they were looking for, Chrissie came and woke me up, and there was a cross burning in our yard. It wasn’t much of a cross, just a little dinky old thing, but still.”