Julie

by Catherine Marshall

  Since Spencer was in desperate need of volunteers to staff what he called his Caring Place, he asked me if I would help him round up some of the town’s teenagers. With no telephone service, how could we reach them? The answer was by word of mouth and through amateur radio hams.

  Margo was one of the first to sign up as a volunteer in the church canteen. A dozen others followed. Soon we were peeling and cutting up bushels of potatoes and other vegetables for soup, making mounds of sandwiches, and above all, keeping two huge urns of coffee filled and steaming hot.

  It was a revelation to me that the heart-center of the canteen was not the food but those coffee urns—an eye-opener because I had not yet acquired any fondness for coffee. Day after day, Margo and I would watch the weary workers—their clothes wet and malodorous from the foul-smelling mud, their faces gray and lined with fatigue—stumble in and push through the crowd to those coffee urns. Once steaming cups were in their hands smiles would return, then become laughter as the talk grew animated.

  The other revelation was the enthusiasm of Spencer Meloy. He seemed to be everywhere at once, meeting needs with minimal equipment and his all-volunteer staff. Both Margo and I found ourselves drawn to his side whenever we could arrange it. Or somehow he would appear beside us. Margo admitted that she had never encountered a man like Spencer to whom she could attribute no selfish ulterior motivation.

  One night I was refilling the coffee urn in the canteen when a familiar face appeared at my side. “You’re Julie Wallace, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Met you at the S-Stemwinder recently. I’m Neal Brinton.”

  “I remember you.”

  From then on Neal appeared regularly at the canteen following his emergency duties at the steel plant. Though being with Margo was his main interest, the towering, craggy-faced steelworker was a conscientious helper. One night during a quiet interlude, he told us how troubled he was about his brother Cade—three years older than he, married, with two children.

  “A bright one,” he told us. “Good with words. Not s-slow, like me.”

  I guessed that Neal was referring to his slight speech impediment, an inclination to stutter over the sound s.

  “Cade can talk the hind legs off a donkey,” he went on. “Right now he’s getting the men stirred up against ERP—you know, the company’s Employee Representation Plan. Could lose his job there any day.”

  “Because the plant is laying off men?” I asked.

  “Not that.” Neal took a quick look around him. “At Yoder they fire those who complain about company policy.”

  “But, Neal, an Employee Representation Plan would seem a fine idea. Why is your brother so opposed to it?”

  “Cade considers ERP a dummy front, management’s last-ditch s-stand to prevent collective bargaining.”

  “Can Cade prove that?”

  Again Neal was cautious. “Cade has s-s-some points on his s-side. It would take awhile to tell you.”

  As Neal talked on, I liked him more and more. For such a big man, he seemed gentle, considerate, fair-minded.

  “Cade and I can get along if there’s distance between us,” Neal told us. “Trouble is, now we’re gonna be thrown together.”

  “How do you mean, Neal?” Margo asked.

  “Cade’s house was wrecked so bad in the flood that he and his family had to move in with us.” Neal went on to explain that after their parents’ death, the Brinton home had been willed to him. He had already rented out half of it to a married couple. Now with Cade, his wife and two children, there would be seven people under one roof.

  As Neal turned away to pour water into one of the coffee makers, Margo and I looked after him sympathetically. Between the depression and the flood, most of Alderton faced disruption.

  By late Sunday the water was slowly beginning to recede, leaving behind a chaotic mess. Monday morning Dad, moving shakily, got out of bed for a few hours. We heard that the National Guard would allow merchants back into downtown Alderton on Tuesday morning; schools would not reopen until the following week.

  Tuesday dawned with leaden gray skies, rather like our spirits. When the Editor insisted on going down to the Sentinel office, Mother and I urged him to drive the Willys. I went with him when Mother decided that she, Tim, and Anne-Marie should stay at home.

  The car made it for twelve blocks; we had to walk the final four through oozing, slimy, stinking mud, the consistency of chocolate pudding. All around us was a meld of decaying animal bodies, rotting food, sewer gas, and small fires spewing up fumes from burning wood, rubber, metal, cloth. The stench made us gag.

  We passed one house whose front wall had been sheared off, leaving the first and second floors open to the elements, like a dollhouse with no front. A few other buildings had been moved off their foundations and stood askew. In one house the staircase had washed out, so that the family had to use a ladder to get to the second floor.

  On Main Street state guardsmen patrolled with 12-gauge shotguns over their shoulders. At Gaither’s Clothing Store, a naked mannequin lay seductively on the edge of the wrecked display window, one of her arms dangling over the window frame, the other thrown over her head, as if in mute appeal.

  Our suspense grew as we walked on. Suppose the presses and all the equipment were ruined? What would we do then? Only one block more and we would know.

  As we rounded the corner from Main Street, Dad exclaimed, “At least the building’s still there!”

  A minute later we were standing in the doorway. One look told us that the Babcock press and the cutter were in place. The water had risen almost to the top of the twelfth step, just four steps short of the rolls of paper on the landing. Dad turned and hugged me, then muttered softly, “We’re still in business, thank God!”

  Early the next morning I was in my room, writing in my journal, when Mother tapped softly on the door, then opened it a crack. “Your father wants to talk to you,” she told me.

  “How is he?”

  “Weak.” Mother smiled wanly. Then she went downstairs to prepare breakfast.

  I found Dad lying propped up in bed, awash in papers. His face was puffy, his eyes dull.

  “Julie, the doctor insists that I should go back to bed for several days. Thinks I’ll overdo it if I get involved with the cleanup at the Sentinel.”

  “That makes sense to me.”

  “Maybe so. But there’s so much to be done.” He sighed. “I’ll stay here two days, no longer.”

  “Any way I can help?”

  “Yes, Julie, there is. The paper should come out with a post-flood issue as soon as possible. We’ll need lots of local facts and human-interest details. Since school won’t resume for at least a week, I’d like you to try being our special reporter. Dig in and get the total story.” He looked me full in the face, his eyes studying me. “Can you do it?”

  Excitement rose in me. “I’d like to try. What about pictures?”

  “I’ll make arrangements to use wire service photos. Plus whatever good pictures local photographers come up with.”

  With a sense of anticipation, I dressed and gulped down breakfast. Then, snatching up a handy canvas tote bag to hold pencils, note pads, and my own small camera, I headed for downtown Alderton.

  On Monday CBS newscaster H. V. Kaltenborn had reported that the governor of Pennsylvania had declared martial law in Alderton and sent in additional units of the National Guard to protect against looting, that the American Red Cross was flying in food and setting up first aid stations, and that six persons had died in the flood, four with heart attacks and two from drowning.

  For two days now reporters and cameramen from big-city papers had been descending upon Alderton. With Fox Movietone News shooting the more dramatic scenes, I knew that people in theaters all over the country would soon be familiar with our town.

  Everywhere I looked there was debris: roofs ripped off houses; pieces of buildings looking like giant matchsticks; blocks of concrete from torn-up sidewalks and
streets; all kinds of household goods—tables, stoves, chairs, refrigerators, pots and pans, broken crockery, shoes, children’s toys.

  The assortment of articles on the floor of Wagner Lumber Company’s warehouse seemed typical: a lawn mower, a davenport, a dead cat, a telephone pole, two trees, several cars, a child’s doll, and tons of vile-smelling mud.

  The lower floors of Municipal Hospital were an unbelievable mess. The water had completely flooded the storage rooms where records had been kept. I wondered why they had not been moved to an upper floor along with the stocks of drugs and medical supplies. I took a picture of the walls of files coated with mud. The oozing brown mass still clung to the ceiling in globs. Could the records ever be dried out and made readable again? No one knew.

  Our high school suffered only minor damage, but two of the three elementary schools had flooded basements and heating systems out of commission or ruined. As a result, a two-week spring recess was declared for the entire Alderton school system.

  In my roamings I discovered an ever-present element of the bizarre. Such as: when the Lutheran pastor took several men with him to assess damage to the church, they were astonished to find the floor of the sanctuary covered with sprouted oats, already two to three inches tall. The oats must have floated in from the feed store down the street.

  And the unexpected plague of earthworms. Evicted from their natural habitat, masses of them went crawling, wriggling and squirming inside homes and stores to the shrieks of housewives and the discomfiture of everybody. How could there be that many earthworms!

  While Yoder Steel buildings were on higher ground and did not have to close, the Trentler Wireworks’ offices were three to four feet deep in the worm-infested mud.

  Word came from Harrisburg, the state capital, that three hundred Works Progress Administration men were being trucked in to help with the cleanup. They were to bring steam shovels, cranes, heavy trucks, and the equipment to pump out basements and to dredge the silt from rivers and creeks. The cleanup was expected to take a month.

  For the more detailed work, shovels were prized. In fact, next to food, water, and crucial medical supplies, the most urgent necessity was for shovels and more shovels. An SOS went out to Harrisburg.

  Mud a foot deep, two feet deep, in places waist high. Mud trampled and churned up and swirled and stirred and waded through and mixed again, sticking glue-like to everything it touched, the foulness acrid to the throat, stinging the eyes, churning the stomach . . . guardsmen poking their billy clubs into that mud as they probed for the bodies of animals—or even people.

  Down at the Sentinel, day after day, members of our family took turns shoveling. I was seeing mud in my sleep—heavy, sticky mud blackened by the coal and liquefied coal dust from a thousand basements—pursuing me like a gigantic octopus.

  The soggy pile of shoveled-out debris in the street outside the newspaper office grew—six feet high, eight feet. Everywhere the WPA men were working feverishly. Bulldozers were creating small mountains of the gluey mass for dump trucks to haul away. Watching these operations, I wondered if there could be any topsoil left on the steep hills encircling our town.

  While filling a notebook with facts, I became aware of something: most people in Alderton possessed an inner core of courage about getting on with life. They refused to give up, no matter how tough the hardships. That inner strength stirred me, moved me. I wanted that kind of stouthearted spunk for myself.

  By Friday, the mud in the Sentinel office basement had been pumped out. Then came the next job—hosing down the floor and walls; when that was done—sweeping out and mopping and scrubbing. Still there was no way to get all the sediment out of the cracks.

  As I wandered in and out of homes, stores, and public buildings, it seemed to me that everything had a dingy look. Despite the use of strong disinfectants, the smell of mud, like a bad memory, would linger for many months.

  When Dad returned to the office after his forced two days of recuperation, he made a list of the small items of equipment which had to be replaced in order to resume publishing. With a pained look, he showed me the total—a minimum of four hundred dollars’ worth. Our savings were exhausted, and income to the paper had virtually stopped. At this point, almost no one was paying his bills. How I ached to be able to do something to ease our financial crisis!

  I expected my eighteenth birthday that Friday to slide by without notice. But Mother baked a cake, and we celebrated at dinner that night although we were so tired we could scarcely keep awake. In my journal I logged this comment:

  On the day that I was officially a grown woman, I felt anything but feminine; rather, befouled from the sweat of hard physical labor and the stinking mud. I wanted nothing so much as to sleep for a week.

  Yet early the next morning, I was back in downtown Alderton, adding to my pages of notes about the flood. I was just coming out of the town hall when I saw a familiar figure striding toward me—Randolph Wilkinson. He was wearing a natty blue windbreaker. Would he remember me?

  As I slowed my pace, watching him approach, he saw me, smiled, stuck out his hand. “Well, Julie Wallace. How are you keeping?”

  “Not very clean,” I answered, amused by his phrasing.

  “I heard your father was ill,” he said softly.

  “Yes, But he’s back at work now.” That my voice sounded breathless made me furious with myself.

  “Capital! When will you publish again?”

  “Next week. I’m out covering the flood for the paper.”

  “The local reporter. Well, now.”

  There was an intangible change in his appraisal of me. “I’m not surprised, though. You’ve the look of a reporter.”

  “What kind of look is that?”

  He laughed. “Questioning . . . tenacious.”

  I was suddenly emboldened. “Mr. Wilkinson, may I have a short interview with you—right now?” I tried to make it seem casual. “About damage to the Club and dam, things like that?”

  “There’s really nothing to report, Julie,” he replied slowly, the geniality slightly diminished. “We had no flooding at the Club and the dam, of course, was not threatened.”

  “I guess it’s the dam that interests me most,” I said, with a persistence that surprised me. “I don’t know much about earthen dams.”

  “They’ve been around for a long time,” he said. “The inspector, Roger Benshoff, is the one to interview on that subject.”

  “How can I get to see him?”

  “You might ring up the Club office on Monday, Julie, and I’ll see what we can do.”

  The interview was over before it had really begun.

  Later that same day I was back in the office, compiling my notes, when I saw Miss Cruley leading a man in a brown leather jacket and knee-high boots to the Editor’s office—Tom McKeever Jr. He was taller than his father, his smile readier. I had seen him several times in the foyer of Baker Memorial Church.

  He nodded to me as he passed by. “You are—?”

  “Julie Wallace, sir.”

  “Of course. Julie Wallace. Yes, yes.”

  The man was certainly more congenial than his father. I warmed to him despite an inner tendency to dislike the entire McKeever family.

  “Happened to be downtown, Ken,” Mr. McKeever said heartily. “Thought I’d drop in to see how you fared. Looks like you’re back in business.”

  “We were fortunate, Tom. The paper could have been wiped out. It wasn’t. I’m hoping to get the presses rolling next week.”

  “Any reason you can’t?”

  “I need to replace some damaged equipment, and we’re short of capital.”

  “Try the bank on Monday. Alderton’s getting disaster relief from the government. Let me know if you have any problems.”

  “That’s great to know, Tom.” All the heartiness was back in my father’s voice.

  “We all need to help each other any way we can,” Tom continued. “That’s why I’m here. Yoder Steel is concerned about all
of you.” He paused. “By the way, Ken, how soon would your press be able to print that special booklet for Yoder?”

  “Most anytime, Tom. The job press wasn’t damaged at all.”

  “Good! We’re working on the copy. I’ll be back in touch soon. Good to have seen you, Ken. You too, Julie.”

  The entire visit had lasted less than five minutes, but what a lift it had given to the Editor!

  Young McKeever’s friendly excursion to town that day stirred much comment. He had even walked through the Lowlands, inspecting damage and reassuring the people that Yoder would move quickly to clean up and repair damaged homes.

  Dean Fleming, along with others in town, questioned McKeever’s motives; he commented wryly that neither father nor son had ever before made such a gesture.

  My father was more generous. Later I heard him say, half musingly, to Mother, “Do you suppose that the son does not see eye to eye with the father’s tough policies? There’s a lot to like in young McKeever.”

  When the bank opened on Monday, my father was there to apply for a disaster loan. He returned an hour later, looking happier than I’d seen him in months. “It went through,” he beamed.

  Later, when the Editor had gone on an errand, I slipped into his office to call Randolph Wilkinson. I wondered, would he remember his promise to get me an interview with Mr. Benshoff, the dam inspector?

  Randolph came on the line almost immediately. “Hullo. Yes, Julie, I spoke with Mr. Benshoff. He inquired of me about the purpose of your interview.”

  “It’s just that I think people need to know more about earthen dams . . . how safe they are . . . things like that.”

  “I . . . see. Well, as of yesterday, Mr. Benshoff buzzed off to some city or other. He’ll be here again in a few days. Why don’t I request that he ring you up himself?”

  “I’d like that.”

  There was a short silence. “Julie, I need to be honest with you about something. The chaps who run this Club have made it clear that they aren’t the least interested in publicity.”