by Jon Stafford
And yet a third life was emerging with the Gregorys, where Goodness held ascendancy. He could be worth something through them, and he dedicated himself to their service. It was a world that made sense, one in which he could be safe from the endless rolling of the dice. He had despised those with means all of his life. Nevertheless, he clung to his new family and what he saw as their high class, though they thought of themselves as middle-class people.
He never really understood how he fit into their lives, and he never ceased to be amazed when he came to live at “The Mansion,” as he called their house. He was always the person looking in the window, rather than the one looking out from the safety behind the glass. He felt guilty for what he took of their love and stability, unaware of the qualities he offered in return: honesty, strength of character, dependability, and selflessness.
Chip felt that he didn’t belong in their world. Because they never inquired into his past, he feared the day would come when they would see him as the low-class trash he thought himself to be. Perhaps someone would denounce him. He often imagined being forced to go away and never able to see his family again. No one ever said a word to him to encourage such thoughts.
Jill teared a little for a moment, thinking of the life she had lived and enjoyed with her husband. Then she began again: Our relationship began when I picked him up at the train station downtown in the spring of 1945, after he came back from Europe. He was still recovering from a terrible wound he’d received in Germany, and he was not doing very well. I have to say I didn’t notice at first. A soldier had to help me haul him out to our old car.
Old Doctor Francis Hart, who delivered my brother and me and was beloved by my family, came to the house to examine Chip. Doctors made house calls in those days.
“I’m surprised the man could even walk,” he said. “The wound has not healed correctly.”
“Will he be all right?” Mother and I asked.
“Well, if he could make it this far with a hole in him like that, I expect he’ll live. I am supposing the bullet hit the spleen. He’ll need two to three months to mend, a month of bed rest, and probably a couple more with light activity. I’ll call [Major General] Bob Mores at Fort Jackson and get him to square it with the First Division people. Now Granton [my mother], if this boy had gone much longer like this, it would have probably killed him, so you keep him in this bed. Under no circumstances is he to be up wandering around. I’m not kidding. We’ll get him an x-ray in a couple of days.”
That was how it started. Chip made a slow recovery at our home, and he and I had months to get to know each other as adults.
Eventually, time soothed the wounds he bore in both body and soul, though the healing took years. The new life changed him slowly, from being a very efficient killer to a successful citizen. The constancy of love he received could not be ignored. Over time, it made him into a more complete person. His old prejudices died off.
In 1948, when Andy was born, Chip waited outside the delivery room. The nurse, in her crisp uniform, came out to place the child in his arms. Awkwardly, he took the bundle and looked at the little person.
“He’s yellow!” he said. “Will he be okay?”
The nurse smiled. “Yes, this is very common. He just has a little jaundice. It will go away in a couple of days.”
He gazed at the contented, sleeping baby. This is my boy, he thought. He remembered when he was in Chicago and first thought of having a child of his own. Now here that child was! This child is me, he thought in absolute wonder, or at least part of me. From now on, I have a real, permanent life that can never be completely taken away, even if I get killed on my next tour of duty. Andy’s birth was the beginning of Chip’s change. He was never the same person thereafter. The Army became secondary; his family came first.
The old woman paused in her task, realizing that despite the passage of so many years, her understanding of her husband had large gaps. But she was not a poor observer, and her intuition came to her aid. She continued:
Some men never grow up. But my Chip never had a childhood. While the rest of us were still in high school, as a seventeen-year-old he was in North Africa with Germans shooting at him. The result was a man who had no patience for silliness, and not much of a sense of humor. As the expression goes, “he was all business!” He had a reputation here as a good man. I have never heard anyone say that he ever broke his word or cheated anyone in a business deal.
He was a loving father to our three boys. Despite his background, or perhaps because of it, he could never muster up the courage to spank any of them, not even once! Of all people, I was stuck in the role of being the disciplinarian! He always defended the boys when he thought it important.
In 1965, Andy was playing high school football. He was small-boned like me, so I’m afraid he really wasn’t much of a player. His coach was Willis Freeman, an imposing man of maybe 250 pounds. His wife had left him some time before. He was an unhappy person, and he was quite abusive to the team, physically and mentally. You could get away with that in 1965, when paddling and such were still going on in schools around here. Sometimes he would hit the players and push them around. Once at a game, he berated our son along the sidelines and actually smacked him in the face, nearly knocking him down. I couldn’t believe it. I climbed down the bleachers to the fence and yelled at the coach in my usual fiery way. Other fans were also upset. But Chip just sat in the stands. The game kept going and it passed, or so I thought.
The following Monday, unknown to me, my husband was waiting for the coach in his office after practice. Andy rode home with friends and so had no idea what went on until Johnny Duncan, whose family is still close to us, told us about it. Johnny had lingered to talk to the coach about not wanting to play left guard or center . . . I have no idea about football. The sense of what he said follows.
The coach had a spacious office under the stands. He evidently had no idea why Chip came to see him. The two sat, and the coach asked what he wanted.
Chip was direct, as always. “I noticed that you slugged Andy during the game on Friday.”
“Yes, Mr. Wiley. These boys need discipline. I believe in giving it to them.”
“I don’t want you to hit him anymore.”
“Well, I’ll try not to,” the coach said casually and probably not too sincerely, as he leaned back on a swivel chair.
“I saw a lot of people mistreated in two wars,” my husband said, “lives thrown away. People are important. I don’t care how you discipline Andy or the others, making him run laps or doing push-ups or whatever the hell else you think important. But I want you to promise me right now that you won’t slug him again, treat him like he’s dirt.”
“Well,” the coach said a little more seriously, “ah . . .”
“You lookie here. Unless you promise me that right now, I’m gonna come across this nice desk of yours and smash your face into this floor for a while. Then we’re goin’ out on the football field, and I’m gonna kick your sorry ass from one end of it to the other.”
Johnny said Chip had been speaking in a very calm voice but that the tone changed with his last comment. I knew exactly what he was talking about, having heard that voice once or twice. I think it was a voice he used in combat. It was something one didn’t want to ignore.
The shocked coach evidently sat up straight and looked at Chip to see if he was serious. “Yes, . . . yes, I ah, I promise, sir!”
“I’ll take your word on it,” Chip said in that same voice. “But if you break your promise, I’ll come back here and break both of your arms so you can’t hit any more kids.”
The news of this made it around the school and the town rather quickly. I must say the result of it was good. The coach’s negative cracks against the team ceased, as did his bullying. He became a much nicer man. In time, he remarried and we came to respect him. The team got better and better too. Our paltry record of zero and three wound up as five and five that year. I recall at the end of the season seeing the coach approach Chip not too far from me and warmly shake his hand.
I have always been a fiery person used to having my way, and we were to have many battles in our married life, mostly about money. When Chip retired from the Army in 1960, he began a company here that demolished buildings and did commercial landscaping. The South was still locked in the throes of segregation, with little building or demolition going on. I was sure I had the better business mind and wanted Chip to advertise statewide. Our battles usually went something like this:
“Chip, money is the thing, money for advertising,” I would insist.
“I know, but I don’t have the money for that. I’m paying on the bulldozer for another couple a years,” he would say.
I would shake my head. “Mother will lend you the money. I asked her again today! Why won’t you do that? You never listen to me!”
He would sit with his head hanging down, saying little, and I would hammer the same points over and over again. Many times I got mad enough to pull the kids up from our little place near the university, load us in the car, and spend a few days here.
Usually though, I would realize that he was doing all he could and that perhaps my temper had got the best of me and I had gone too far. The process made him feel worthless, as though he could not provide for us. We would all come back to our house. I would apologize and kiss him sweetly, and we would be back on par. He never responded to me the same way or said an unkind word to me, though he might not talk to me for a while.
It was like that most of our first married years. But by the time Jamie and L.C. were in grade school, our arguments ceased. Luckily, Columbia was becoming stronger economically, and the demolition business began doing very well. I kept the books and figured out the right time to buy this piece of machinery or that. All the boys learned to operate backhoes and bulldozers! They never had any trouble finding something to do in the summer.
I could say my husband was a secretive man. I think calling him a loner would probably be closer. He never shared his hopes and dreams with any of us, and he never discussed business with the boys. I recall one of his comments to Jamie about his battles with me only because such remarks were so unusual. He said about one of my glances: “Sometimes, I think they’re worse than German bullets.”
Chip was a worker, some would say to the point of ignoring our kids. But his business took many years to be successful, and of course my doing the books didn’t bring in extra money, so the burden was on him to provide for us. Also, he had survived two wars by being a scout. Working alone was part of his nature.
My mother was the glue that kept us all together. My father, an attorney named Harmon Calder Gregory, died suddenly when I was sixteen. One day in 1943, his secretary found him bent over this desk, dead from a massive stroke. He had the reputation amongst his own family of never being seen outside his bedroom without a suit coat and tie. He was forty-five.
Much responsibility fell on the shoulders of my mother, the very lovely Granton Grace Maroth Gregory. She preferred the awkward name Granton because her mother’s name was Grace and she did not wish to be “Little Grace.” Even so, the family called her “Gigi” (pronounced Gig-ee).
She might complain about the time necessary to fix herself up, but I rarely saw her when she was not nicely dressed and manicured. She was a true aristocrat among women, beloved by everyone who knew her. Her background remained obscure to us and continues to be so to this day. She said easily enough that she was an orphan, but there the story ended. She never spoke of her real folks. I think it likely that she didn’t know who they were. We learned nothing of this from our grandparents, who Mama described as the “sweet old couple who raised me in a small town in North Carolina.” They were long departed before we kids came along. She had enough money from Father’s insurance and business interests to maintain a very nice lifestyle and raise two children, my brother Scott and me, by herself without a relative in the world.
My Chip loved her very much. Like her, he had no family of his own, at least any that he ever told us of. Mother knew exactly what he needed. He gave her credit for making his life a happy one, and his allegiance to her knew no bounds. He was a man of terrific loyalties, and he spoke to the boys harshly only on those few occasions when they innocently or foolishly said something unkind about her.
When she died suddenly at eighty, his reaction frightened the rest of us. While her children and grandkids gathered around weeping and consoling one another, his reaction was a solitary one. For nearly thirty hours after the funeral, he sat in a chair on the porch, eating nothing and only occasionally sipping some water. He might clear his throat or run his hands through his hair, but he said nothing with the most stolid expression on his face, looking straight forward. I shooed the family away from trying to speak to him. Finally, he stood up, announced he had to go to work, and walked out the door.
My dear family, I apologize, but I tire of writing. My arthritis gets the best of me now and then, and it has taken me these two days to compose these few lines. I never did learn to work a computer. So I will let my eldest, Andy, transcribe these notes and continue on with the parts of our family’s life that he knows best.
–Jillian Gregory Wiley
Andy
My father was a tough man made hard by combat in two wars. He bore several wounds from his service. He was shot in the left side in Germany in 1945. It took nearly nine months for him to recover enough to go back on active duty. Without that furlough, I would probably not be writing this, because he and my mother fell in love during that time. He had a very noticeable scar on his left shin that he dismissed as “nothing to worry about, just a scratch, really!”
He later got a few shrapnel wounds in Korea, but he had an especially ugly wound to his right shoulder, which again led to a long recovery. Time did little to smooth its jaggedness. I heard some of his friends tell me about their experiences in Korea, but I never could get a word out of him. Mostly, he laughed about these wounds. One might have assumed that they caused him no pain at all, but I learned otherwise.
His health began declining in the late 1990s. Once, I accompanied him to the VA hospital here in town for outpatient treatment for the removal of a cyst on his back. The surgeon figured it was caused by one of the old pieces of shrapnel that had never quite worked its way to the surface. Dad took his shirt off, displaying the physique of a man of perhaps forty, not an ounce of fat on his body. He weighed 170 pounds. As he moved his right shoulder, both the physician and I saw him wince noticeably.
“How long has that shoulder bothered you?” the young doctor asked.
Dad looked away for a moment, then looked at the man and answered nonchalantly. “Oh, Doc, I guess about forty years.” I was shocked. Later I asked Mother about it.
“He’s never said anything to anyone about it, not even to me,” she said, “and has never taken pain medicine that I know of. He has some nerve damage in that shoulder and has some serious pain in it periodically. He’s hidden it from all of us as well as he could all these years. You’ll notice if you watch him carefully that sometimes he stops what he’s doing, and his eyes seem to squint a little. That’s when the pain catches up with him. In a minute or so, he’s all right. I’ve urged him to go to a doctor a hundred times.”
None of us kids had ever noticed. Like I said, he was a tough man, even at age seventy-five.
Dad was most happy in the woods. He was a true outdoorsman and hunter. The time he spent with us boys was taken up hunting and camping, many times with Uncle Scott, whom, strangely, we called “Uncle Bun.” I always forget the story on that one.
They knew people with large tracts of land in the country, and they took me along when Jamie and L.C., who most everyone called “the Twins,” were too young. Soon, even as little boys, they were out in the woods tromping about. We began with sticks but packed rifles as we got older. We all had wonderful times blasting away at birds, squirrels, and even fish.
For deer hunting, Dad always had his M-1 Garand rifle he had used in World War II and Korea, a unique weapon in that it had a large chip out of the stock. We told him a hundred times that he should buy a new rifle, but he ignored us. “This is the best infantry weapon that will ever be invented. I like this one.”
