The Last Season

by Stuart Stevens

  “How many landings did you participate in?” I asked quietly.

  He paused for a minute, pulling the number up. “Twenty-eight. Twenty-eight different invasions.”

  There was a long silence while the number sank in. Finally, the Englishwoman hugged him.

  Later we ate in the museum café that had a 1940s theme. We were both tired. I think I was more emotionally exhausted. “Did you see that display with the estimates of the American casualties of a Japanese invasion?” I asked. “Half a million to over a million U.S. dead or wounded. The army had produced over half a million Purple Hearts.”

  “We were headed to Okinawa to prepare for the invasion. That’s when they dropped the first of those awful bombs.” He looked away, but I could see him tear up. “Then they dropped the second awful bomb.” “Awful bomb”: it was a description I’d never heard him use before. In its very ordinariness, it suddenly made the reality of massive death more personal and specific.

  “When we got to Okinawa, instead of loading combat troops, which had been our original mission, after the surrender we loaded with equipment for a weather station,” Dad said. “We sailed off the northern tip of Japan. We were about a hundred yards offshore, and a boat paddled out with old Japanese men. We didn’t have anybody who spoke Japanese, and they didn’t speak a word of English. But we knew they had been suffering. They were skin and bones. So we gave them a boat filled with food for their village.”

  He smiled. “They were so grateful.” We sat quietly and ate our sandwiches. When we were finished, Dad looked around as if noticing the café for the first time. “They did a really nice job with this. Yes, sir, they did.” Then, as we started to get up, he said, “I often thought about how if the war had gone on, those Japanese who came out to our ship for help would have been terrified of us. And heaven knows what might have happened to them.”

  Back at the apartment, I asked him if he remembered much about the different landings or if they all blurred together. My mother was out running errands, and it was just the two of us in the smallish apartment. It was good for her to get out without having to worry about him.

  “I don’t think about it much,” he said. “But that fellow from the museum asked me the same question when he came.” The World War II museum had an extensive oral history project, and a young historian had traveled to Asheville to interview him a few years earlier.

  “So I got to thinking about it and made a list.”

  “A list?”

  “Of the landings.” He went into the bedroom and came back with two pages. “I think this was everything.”

  I read through it. It was a list of twenty-eight landings he had participated in, with some brief notes on each: “frequent air attacks,” “heavy air (kamikaze), mortar, artillery fire, severe casualties, ships and personnel,” “four LST’s severely damaged,” “midget sub, air and mortar fire.”

  I sat back and tried to imagine what it was like: the kamikaze planes coming in waves, the screams of the wounded and dying, seeing other ships go down and wondering if you were next. I remembered him telling me about a kamikaze pilot barely missing the ship and being so close that for an instant he could lock eyes with the pilot in his death spiral.

  “Which was the worst?” I asked and was immediately sorry I had. I was trying to bring order to the unimaginable. Rank the horrors, like an Internet listicle, and that would make it seem less terrifying. He looked at the list, lost in thought. Then he shook his head. He put the list down. “Let’s talk about football. Who are we playing next weekend? Arkansas?”

  “That’s in two weeks. We’ve got Idaho this weekend. It’s homecoming.”

  “Idaho?” He made it sound totally impossible, as if it were the University of Mars. I pretty much felt the same way.

  “Yep. Idaho. Then Arkansas. Then Troy.”

  “Troy? Where is Troy?”

  “Alabama. They can be good. Tough school. Not big, but tough.”

  “I hate games like that. We don’t get any credit if we win, and it scares me to death.”

  “Yep. Then Missouri.”

  “Missouri? They’re good this year.”

  “Really good. If we can beat them, we can get back in the top twenty, I bet.”

  “Where is it this year?”

  “Starkville.”

  He grimaced. “That’s a shame.”

  I nodded. It was comforting to walk through the rest of the year, a reassuring rosary of familiarity. The football schedule was everything that list of island landings was not. The twenty-eight landings were a chronicle of chaos and pain, but a season of weekends built around the rituals of football was dependable in its pleasures and the predictability and scale of its disappointments. Many people loved to point to the game as a metaphor for life, spinning out the lessons learned on the field to the landscape of life. There was surely truth in that, but it had never interested me much. The football that my father and I loved was too good to try to look for some usefulness in it any more than you’d go to church really expecting a limp to be healed. It was good because it was good, and that was enough.

  —

  This love of college football and its importance in life’s scheme are natural for a southerner but difficult for the uninitiated to grasp. When I first moved to New York City in the 1980s, it was not a happy time in the city’s fortunes. Subways resembled filthy, graffiti-covered prison cells. Everyone talked about crime the way Alaskans talk about bears or ski patrollers discuss avalanches. But I loved it. Like generations of expats in a foreign land, I fell into a crowd of fellow countrymen: southerners and mostly Mississippians. They were everywhere; it was years before I had any close friends in the city who weren’t southern. In retrospect, that seems depressing, but it troubled me not at all in the moment. The crime, the postapocalyptic subways, the never-ending hunt for decent apartments that had perplexed every wave of New Yorkers since the Dutch, that all seemed part of the assumed rigors of big-city life. It was to be expected, and complaining would have been like paying lots of money for a trip to the rain forest and grousing it was wet. That was New York. It was how the city worked and people lived.

  But every fall weekend, we would slide into a deep, predictable funk. We wanted to watch football—real football. At some point before each weekend, a depressing series of phone calls would commence among southern expats over the scarcity and quality of the football options on New York City television. “Holy Cross versus Harvard? Can you believe it? My high school played better football.”

  It was much as I imagine growing up in a culture with wonderful, distinctive food—India or the Szechuan Province of China—and moving to a drab place where the only options were awful strip mall restaurants that were all the more insulting for their claims to authenticity: “Real Indian” or “Genuine Chinese.” They called these sad northeastern college efforts “football,” but it was hardly a creature of the same species. Once a few of us dragged up to see Columbia play, and we left before the half. It wasn’t just what was happening on the field; it was the entire experience. The few students who condescended to come seemed more interested in the mocking hipness of playing at being football fans. Some actually read books during the game. This was like bringing a six-pack to church to get through the sermon. “Like Communion served to atheists at the Joyce Kilmer rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike,” a friend described it as we rode back on the subway. Another friend was so depressed he flew home the next weekend for the Ole Miss–LSU game and never came back to New York. I didn’t blame him a bit.

  When there was a good game on television—and good meant that it had to involve a top southern, preferably SEC, team—we’d gather at one of our small apartments and stare at the screen, each of us homesick in a different way. It wasn’t just that we missed going to the games; we missed being fans who could find comfort in the presence of other fans. When you showed up at an Ole Miss–Alabama game or an Auburn-Alabama game, life’s complicated choices were reduced to a binary def
inition: you were for one team or the other, and whom you were for was pretty much all anyone needed to know. It was an identity that superseded all others.

  Most of us had come to New York because we believed, on some level, that we had no choice. It was both a test of who we were and a way to define who we might become. It wasn’t a fear of failure at home that drove us to New York but a fear that success at home might be all too satisfying. The expats in my crowd had no illusions about the South. We were scornful of those we deemed “professional southerners,” those living in New York who tried to define themselves by some pretense that they came from a more genteel and cultured world.

  But all of that changed on fall Saturdays, when we would gather in a self-congratulatory orgy of southern boosterism and shared loathing of the northeast brand of football. It gave us an opportunity to be smug, a joyful rarity for us in New York, but most of all it was an affirmation that though we may come from a not-so-perfect spot, we believed in something larger than ourselves that made us better than ourselves. In a confusing world, this festival of southern football was a constant that rarely disappointed.

  One of the great virtures of the South is the assumption that football is important. When my parents and I were in New Orleans and saw old friends of theirs, no one thought it was odd that we were spending months going to Ole Miss games. It was hard to imagine a like reaction in Connecticut if you announced plans of taking three months off and going to every, say, Brown game. It would be seen, at best, as quirky, sort of like closely following jai alai or having strong opinions on who should play for the United States in the Croquet World Championship. But in the South, even in New Orleans, organizing a life around college football games seemed like a perfectly reasonable endeavor.

  —

  By Thursday before the next game, we all were eager to get back to Oxford. That was the rhythm of a fan’s life, and I loved that it was now the focus of our lives. We drove to Oxford and settled back in the hotel on campus. My father and I immediately headed to the student union for the frozen yogurt we’d come to love. The union was filled with spirit signs of homecoming.

  MASH THOSE IDAHO POTATOES! read a huge sign. My father shook his head with a pained expression. “Ole Miss is playing Idaho? Idaho?”

  “It’s strange,” I agreed.

  “If you coach for Idaho,” my father asked, “what do you tell your players at halftime? Go play like potatoes?”

  I laughed. “Their mascot is the Vandals.”

  “The Vandals?” He thought for a minute, then said, “I don’t believe it.”

  I pulled up the University of Idaho Web site on my iPhone and read it to him: “Don’t use your dictionary to find Idaho’s definition of a Vandal. No, Idaho’s student-athletes go by a name earned nearly a century ago by a basketball team coached by Hec Edmundson, whose teams played defense with such intensity and ferocity that sports writers said they ‘vandalized’ their opponents.”

  “They’re named after a basketball team?” My father frowned. He and I both found basketball to be a slightly suspect sport.

  “Apparently.”

  He looked pained. “What’s their record this year?”

  I pulled it up. “This is encouraging,” I said. “They lost to the University of North Texas 6–40.”

  “Six to forty?” my father marveled. “Is University of North Texas any good?”

  “Not that good. Then they lost to University of Wyoming 10–42.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “And Washington State 0–42.”

  “They have a good team. Washington State,” my father said.

  “Yep. And hey, they beat Temple 26–24. In Idaho. It was their homecoming.”

  “Nobody wants to lose homecoming. But Temple? From Philadelphia? I didn’t know they played football. I thought it was a basketball school. So that’s it? They win any other games this year?” my father asked.

  I reviewed the results. “Nope. Lost to Fresno and Arkansas State too.”

  “This is definitely encouraging,” he agreed. “Looks like a good homecoming match.”

  “Come on,” I said to my dad. “I want to show you something.”

  We walked out of the student union and toward downtown. “Hear that?” I asked.

  It was warm, more like August than November, one of those perfect days that are a reminder of how much summer will be missed. In the distance, a familiar song carried through the soft air. My father perked up, like a bird dog on a scent.

  “Band practice,” I explained.

  We had walked to the edge of the campus and were in front of the band building. THE PRIDE OF THE SOUTH: OLE MISS BAND, the sign read. It was redbrick and formidable. Around the side was the practice field for the band. “This used to be the high school,” my father said, “University High School. They had football games around back.” I didn’t know that, but it made sense. It looked like a high school, one of those imposing structures they built for schools when the formality of the buildings seemed connected to the seriousness of the educational task.

  Behind the band building on the old high school’s football field, the Ole Miss band, dressed in shorts and jeans, was practicing for homecoming. The band director conducted from a stepladder. He’d shout instructions to move this section here or that section over there, and a seemingly random group of students would transform into order. It resembled some large-scale game of chess with human pieces. They were practicing the “Ole Miss Alma Mater,” a favorite at the games. It was lyrical and elegiac, a song from my youth. It was an odd song to play at a football game, sad and haunting, but this was Mississippi, and anything that could evoke a sense of loss was powerful medicine. I looked over at my dad, and he was smiling.

  “Do you know what the lyrics are to it?” I asked.

  He thought for a moment. “There are words? No one sings it. I don’t have a clue.”

  I pulled up the words on my iPhone.

  “Is everything in there?” he asked, nodding to my phone.

  “All human knowledge,” I assured him. “Found it. Here are the lyrics: ‘Way down south in Mississippi, there’s a spot that ever calls. Where amongst the hills enfolded, stand old Alma Mater’s Halls.

  “ ‘Where the trees lift high their branches, to the whispering Southern breeze. There Ole Miss is calling, calling, to our hearts fond memories.’ ”

  I looked up to find Dad frowning. “I think there’s a reason nobody ever sings it,” he said.

  We watched as the student musicians joked around, looking bored, like a random collection of students who had been handed these odd things called instruments. But then, when the director’s baton went up and they poised to play, something quite miraculous happened. They were transformed from just kids into some force transcendent. They became magicians conjuring miracles from the air.

  In Geronimo Rex, Barry Hannah’s brilliant first book, he described the powerful effect of a southern marching band: “The band was the best music I’d ever heard, bar none. They made you want to pick up a rifle and just get killed somewhere.” So it was with the scruffy bunch who would form up on Saturdays in brilliant uniforms and transform themselves into the “Pride of the South” band. They tore into a medley that was a standard of every game. At the heart of it was the revised version of “Dixie” that the band now played.

  Like every Ole Miss fan, I’d grown up with the Ole Miss band playing “Dixie,” an assumed ritual like the singing of the national anthem. It was the Ole Miss football anthem. It was our anthem. Today it is popular for sports fans to call themselves “nation”: “Red Sox Nation” or “Who Dat Nation” for the New Orleans Saints. But when “Dixie” played at Ole Miss games, it represented the lost glory of an actual nation. No one ever died for the right to form Red Sox Nation. Tens of thousands died for the brief existence of the Dixie nation.

  In those days, the band would play “Dixie,” Colonel Reb waved his sword, the Confederate flags would fly, and for that moment it could recap
ture a past as glorious as the last dance at Tara, when victory was assured and soon the Yankees would be taught a lesson. At the finale, the crowd would rise and join as one, shouting, “The South shall rise again!”

  Inevitably, the irony, if nothing else, of having a team that was more than half African American charging to battle behind Colonel Reb and the Confederate battle flag became difficult to ignore. The school dropped Colonel Reb in 2003 and banned Confederate flags. That left “Dixie,” which was a tougher call to ban. Though frequently assumed to have been a Confederate anthem, the song was actually a favorite of Abraham Lincoln, who had it played at the announcement of Robert E. Lee’s surrender. But its fate as an Ole Miss regular was probably sealed with the crowd chant of “The South shall rise again” that rose up with the finale. It didn’t help that the Ole Miss band wore uniforms modeled after Confederate battle dress. But the idea of Ole Miss football with no “Dixie,” no Colonel Reb, and no Rebel flags was hard for many to grasp. As one Mississippi friend of mine, a former McGovern worker who now gave large sums to the Democratic Party, put it scornfully, “We might as well be the Syracuse of the South.”

  Instead of a complete ban on “Dixie,” a compromise was reached. A modified version of “Dixie” would be allowed as part of a longer medley. Like the approaching death of a loved one, the final days of the original “Dixie”—“From Dixie with Love” was the full title—were marked with solemn ceremonies: the last playing at a special performance at the Grove in 2010. For the true believers, it was like the killing of the Latin Mass for a cheaper, junk-food variety more digestible to a broader audience.

  Before my dad and I went to the season’s first game at Vanderbilt, I realized that a part of me would want the games to be as they had always been. I remembered too well that simple joy when the cheerleaders would throw bundles of Confederate flags into the stands to be passed around like muskets at dawn reveille. Had somebody handed me a Confederate flag when the Rebels took the field, I’d have waved it out of pure muscle memory and maybe more. Or if that sweaty hot night in Nashville, Colonel Reb had made one more fateful, doomed charge through the goalpost chased by the band in their old-style Confederate uniforms playing the unrepentant “From Dixie with Love,” I’d have stood and shouted, “The South shall rise again!” at the end with a clean heart. It would have been a piece of frozen time handed to me by a benevolent God, and I’d have licked it like an ice cream cone, joyous and grateful.