by Jon Stafford
We were amazed at his skills in the woods. I never saw him miss a shot with the Garand, even ones as far away as two hundred yards. Usually, none of the rest of us even saw the deer. Only once did a deer move after he shot at it, according to L.C.; one time when I was not along. It had evidently flinched as Dad fired, and though shot behind the shoulder, the wounded animal made off.
L.C. saw a pained look on Dad’s face as they trailed it. At first he thought Dad was miffed because he hadn’t brought it down with one shot. But soon he realized Dad was more concerned that the animal was made to suffer. They trailed it for most of a mile, Dad bending down to look at the ground and, without comment, pointing in the direction the animal had gone.
L.C. would ask him: “Daddy, how do you know where he went?”
“See,” Dad said, “there’s a little blood on this leaf.” Then he pointed several feet away. “There’s another drop. He’s pumping his heart out.” He looked at a bush. “Notice this branch, how it’s bent in this way? An animal passed through here, probably that buck.”
Eventually, they found the animal, dead. Dad carried it back to the station wagon, where he slung it on the roof. He always insisted that every part of an animal that could be used was used, even having sausage made from it, which he gave away.
As Jamie tells it, “When we were out somewhere, we all had our drugstore compasses and all had views as to what direction would take us back to the car. We’d all point differently. Then, without comment and without a compass of his own, perhaps after looking up at the trees for a minute, Dad would point. He was never wrong. We thought it a great feat to be the closest to the right direction.”
He counseled us on shooting too. “I wouldn’t take that shot. See, it’s open behind there, and that bullet could travel a long way. And we don’t know, somebody could live back in there.”
When we went camping and got up in the morning, he’d sniff the air and tell us what the temperature was, always within a degree or two of any thermometer we could hurriedly drag out. He just amazed us. Those were the moments when we felt closest to him and understood him best.
Dad wasn’t demonstrative, even to Mama or to us boys. I never saw him hug anyone. But he showed his love in other ways. All three of us played high school football and never expected that he could make our games. With his business coming on strong, he might be in Charlotte or Augusta on a Friday football night. But many a time, we caught sight of him at the fence. By the end of the game, sometimes he was gone, having to get some rest before being off very early the next morning. Some time later, he might say to Jamie, who was the best player of us: “That was a good catch you made on the five-yard line.”
He rarely said anything that could be considered sweet or mushy to any of us. Once or twice, though, he said things that gave him away.
When I entered college and met my darling Kay, I asked Dad what he thought of women. “I would be nothing without your mother and grandmother,” he said, “nothing. Maybe Kay will mean the same to you.” Other than Mam and Grandmother, though, I think he didn’t really know what to make of women. He talked to them courteously and didn’t avoid them, but his real friendships were with men.
My father had men whom he trusted and always did business with, never shopping around. He bought all his heavy machinery from Jacob Puller and his John Deere dealership in Winnsboro and wouldn’t accept anyone else’s business card. All agree that he worked his employees hard, but not as hard as he worked himself. I only saw him angry a few times, on occasions when he felt someone had “crossed” or “betrayed” him. To those people, he was unforgiving, never speaking to them again. He worked terrifically long hours. We actually saw little of him when we were very young.
Besides Dad, there were other people in our lives growing us, a series of black people who worked at the house who were all thought of as family. I recall a wonderful old gentleman, Sam, the yardman, who was still around when I entered college in 1966. He was a great baseball fan. He’d played minor league baseball in the Negro Leagues and spent a lot of time talking about “them good ol’ days.” He also attempted to “learn you,” as he called it, “how to throw a drop,” or curveball. Mostly, he wasted his time, because I never caught on.
He often took me fishing. He had two grandsons, or “grands,” as he called them, Wilber and Floyd, both older than I. Floyd was close enough to my age that we became great pals. Sam had a series of ancient Ford pickup trucks as long as I knew him. Wilber, Floyd, and I would ride in the back and take off for days at a time, camping and fishing. I loved Sam. He was a man of almost no education and very little means. But he was always cheerful, honorable, and decent.
I do have to roll my eyes a bit thinking of the times he picked up “road kill,” some poor beast that had been run over. He would haul the mangled corpse home and whip it up into an amazingly tasty supper. He drew the line at possums, but deer, raccoons, and such were fair game. He had several expressions I think of often. He would say, “The boat tumped over,” meaning it turned over. And “On today, boys.” He passed away after a long illness, and I recall the large turnout for his funeral. I have no idea how old he was. He loved to quote his hero, the old baseball pitcher “Satchel” Paige, who said, “Don’t look back. Life could be gainin’ on ya.” I took that to mean that one’s actual age is very relative, depending on the person, and there’s no use in even asking, which I believe is true. He was a true friend and confidant. I have to say he was a surrogate father to me until Dad retired from the service in 1960.
I became great pals with Floyd. His skills in growing things and with animals were wondrous. He loved squirrels and wound up raising a host of them that had fallen out of nests as babies. People would bring them to our house looking for him.
He would let the squirrels crawl all over him, which I thought very awkward and uncomfortable. Unintentionally, they dug their little claws right into you! It was like little pinpricks. He could hold them in his hands and tell what they were thinking. “Old Wiggy here’s giving me that look. He doesn’t need us anymore. He’ll go off in another day or two and by next spring have his own family. That’s just the way of things, and it can’t be altered by man.” He could recognize them in the trees for months afterward, when they looked like any other squirrel to the rest of us. He was a gentle soul. Drafted in 1969, he never came back from Vietnam.
Ida Mae Wilkerson, who cooked for Grandmother, came most days of the week. She was a huge woman, a real battleship, from cooking for many years and frying most everything she cooked. The cornbread she made was to die for. Of course, she made fried chicken! That was every Wednesday and the high point of the week for us boys. Her patience with us seemed inexhaustible, especially with little L.C., who would ask for a cheese sandwich and then change his mind when she was about to serve it. She didn’t mind, since she could just take the food home for her own kids. When she cooked she made enough for us and for her own family as well, a lot of food!
When Jamie and L.C., only two years apart, were wrestling on the floor, she might yell at them. “You break somethin’ and you won’t get no supper if I have ta clean it up. You boys go outside.” We knew she meant what she said, and it was enough to stop any fracas!
We kids were hard to keep up with. Yet we all did pretty well. All of us took something from our father’s martial past and went to The Ci
tadel, the military college in Charleston, some one hundred miles south of here. I spent two tours in Vietnam, luckily surviving without a scratch, and have spent the last forty years following my grandfather’s profession of the law. Jamie and L.C. still run the same demolition company Dad founded.
We met some of Dad’s comrades as they came through Columbia, like Mr. Torgeson and Dad’s old captain, Mr. Redding. One person we became familiar with was Mrs. Dietrich, the wife of a soldier my father served with in Germany who was killed. Dad had gone to see her in Detroit after the war, and then we kept in touch. She wrote long, lovely letters that Mama read to us. I think Dad wrote her for a while, but soon Mama took up the task. Mrs. Dietrich’s life always seemed to stay the same. She worked as the secretary in an insurance company her father had started. Even after her father sold the business in 1950, she remained the secretary until her retirement in 1985. She remained in the same apartment, describing the decline of her neighborhood and Detroit too until crime became so bad that she wrote us she’d moved.
In 1988, all of her relatives pooled their birthday gifts and gave the sixty-five-year-old widow a Caribbean cruise. She flew to Charleston to board the ship. Within thirty minutes, she met a widower named Charlie Hartestee, from Macon, Georgia. By the end of the cruise, he’d proposed and she’d accepted! We all attended the wedding in Macon. It was the only time I ever met her.
Of all of Dad’s old comrades, the one we saw the most was a retired soldier at Fort Jackson, Staff Sergeant Orville C. Betts. I first saw him when I was a boy of six, and he seemed fine to me. But his health deteriorated quickly over a period of a dozen years, and he died in the fall of 1963. Dad and I spent too many afternoons to count visiting his quarters at the fort. We were both pallbearers at his funeral.
The sergeant’s wife, Alma, was a goodhearted, plain woman whom I came to love very much. I often helped her get meals together as the two men talked. When I was little, I just watched. As I got older, she entrusted more tasks to me. I never worked so well with another person, even my wife or brothers. And she was a fun person to talk to. She had only a high school education, but she had read some, and she got me interested in literature.
Alma talked about the characters from Great Expectations, especially Pip, Magwitch, and Wemmick, as though they were her good friends. She talked to me about the inequalities of justice, including Les Miserables, where Javert the policeman is the bad guy and the convict, Jean Valjean, is the hero. She taught me that those in positions of power aren’t necessarily good or right, a lesson I have always remembered in practicing the law.
She talked much of her husband’s decline. It was due to a phosgene gas attack in France in October of 1918, near the end of World War I, which he had recounted to her on many occasions. They had no children. She’d grown up in Wisconsin, with six brothers and sisters. Her father was a salesman, and she talked of being hungry many times in her youth. After her marriage, due to her Army moves, she rarely saw her family and that hurt her.
“I would’ve liked to have seen my Mama just once more before she died,” she told me once, with moistness in her eyes. “Orville and I just didn’t have the money for me to go to her funeral.” She spoke of her sister, Jean, who she missed “every day.” She recalled the countryside where she grew up and said, “Sometimes it calls to me, like in a dream.” She missed snow and said, “I always liked the cold weather, when we would huddle by the stove and talk.” She told me about the ten Army bases where the couple lived, someplace in Nebraska being her favorite. Both she and Sergeant Betts spent many a time at our house as well. She continued to be a valued friend to all of us until she died in 1980.
I also recall many conversations between the sergeant and my father. They had a very close bond. When they were together, it was one of the few times I saw Dad laugh hysterically so that tears came down his face. The conversations were always, always about the thing they shared; the US Army. Dad called Sergeant Betts “sir.” I suppose that was out of respect because Dad had the higher rank. Betts called him “lieutenant,” and, later “captain,” in return.
They talked a lot about weapons they’d used in war. I recall one conversation they had about the thirty-seven-millimeter cannon.
“That thing was the worst gun I ever saw,” Dad said. “We used it in weapons platoons pulled by a Jeep. Once in Sicily, we got pinned down near this huge concrete bunker with a couple of machine guns in it, those fast firers, MG 42s. You couldn’t stick your boot out from behind the wall without gettin’ it shot off.
“I was a sergeant then. The lieutenant, one of those guys just out of West Point, had been killed an hour before. He was a good young officer, Jenkins. He just stuck his head up once too often, and one of those guns put a bullet right through his helmet. So I sent my runner back for this gun. He was a good man, a corporal named Bullock, who I think got it the next week.
“I went back to meet the gun crew. In ten minutes, these six guys roar up in this Jeep, towin’ this damn gun. The thing weighed nine hundred pounds, but the shell only weighed a measly two pounds, nothin’ compared to German stuff.”
Dad and Betts both laughed.
“These guys jump out of the Jeep. They were real good, muscling that thing into place and unlimbering it in maybe thirty seconds. They start shootin’ at that bunker about 250 yards off while I’m lookin’ through my field glasses. First shot missed the aperture by a foot to the right. I don’t even think the enemy knew we were shootin’ at them!”
The old sergeant chuckled. Dad went on.
“I’m tellin’ you, sir, I could hardly see a dent in the concrete of that pillbox! It was like throwin’ darts at it. But, hoop, hip, hop, throwin’ those tiny shells from one guy to another, and they shot again, this time missin’ by about six inches. It had such low velocity you could actually see the thing, see the drop in the trajectory. I’ll bet it dipped a foot before it hit. The Germans must have heard that one, as they started rangin’ for us. Our guys fire again, and this time the shell goes right in the aperture, and that’s all she wrote.”
That’s how their conversations went, first when Dad had leave and for a couple years after he retired. Betts’ condition declined slowly, until near the end he had to be covered by a blanket even in nice weather.
Once, after he died and Alma came for dinner, Alma told me a story that’s stayed with me. At the end of the war when Dad came home from Germany, he had spent weeks at Mama’s family home recovering from a wound. When he was well enough, he went to see Sergeant Betts at the fort. Alma said she and her husband were sitting outside about midmorning when this tall soldier approached impeccably dressed, adorned in his five campaign ribbons.
“We had no idea who he was at first. He walked right up to us and was about to introduce himself to us when both Orville and I recognized him. You see, he’d been for supper many a time during his training. I rose to say hello. But Orville looked at him, and tears began to come down his face. Chip didn’t know what to do, nor did I. Chip and I looked kindly at one another, but Orville was overcome. In the end, your dad politely bowed and asked to be excused and said he would come back. That began their deep friendship.”
At age eighty-three, the day came for my father as well. I knew what to do because he had prepared me for it.
“Andy, when I go, I want you to do somethin’ for me
.” He showed me two lists in a drawer, with many names, addresses, and phone numbers on each. Most had been crossed out and a date written in. I was to contact the first man left on each list. As the World War II veterans Dad knew had aged, they had established phone chains to spread the news when one of their number passed on. The Korean War vets had begun one as well. I called Mr. Redding from the first list and Larry Reyes, who had been a sergeant with Dad in Korea, from the other.
Dad died on a Wednesday in March. The funeral was on Saturday afternoon, with visitation after the interment.
While family and friends gathered in the house in Heathwood, the old veterans gathered in the backyard. There were eight of them. Being the only one of Dad’s children to be a veteran, I sat with them. Some of these men we’d seen before as they came through town and spent the night in long conversations with Dad, always in the backyard with its chairs surrounding our circular brick patio. Some I’d never seen before. In the early spring evening, the temperature perfect, I surveyed the group.
They were old men, gray-headed or balding. As the light dimmed, they appeared almost like ghosts. They had come, despite distance and the added expense of booking flights only a day or two in advance. Some hadn’t been able to make the funeral and had just appeared at the house. But there they were, from six different states, retired men whose occupations had varied from janitor to millionaire businessman. Three were left from World War II, the rest from service in Korea.
Some had retained their martial bearing and looked like old soldiers. Others were just paunchy old men. While from different social classes, their clothing failed to give them away. They looked like, and were, one. Once young men, their bodies hard, time had taken its toll. But the bond forged in combat, stronger than love, stronger than hate, had never weakened. The trumpet had sounded once again, and they had answered the call. A part of each had died with my father’s death, and no hardship could keep them away. Dad had been part of this. Many a time he’d left us on scant notice after a call and disappeared for a day or so. The process had been mysterious to our family, until now.
