4

An Awful Attack of Sentimentality

I spent a lot of time during those last couple of weeks before my surgery taking stock of my life, which currently amounted to thirty-five years and some change. Thirty-five.

When I was ten, I had wanted to be sixteen, so I could drive a car. When I was sixteen, I had wanted to be twenty-one so I could walk into a bar and order a drink. When I was twenty-one, I had wanted to be thirty, so I could pontificate on the great issues of the day and nobody would say, “What on earth is that kid talking about?”

When I was thirty, I was satisfied. I think thirty is the perfect age. At thirty you can do all the things grownups do, like invest in a tax shelter or smoke a cigar, but you’re still young enough to waste your money on sports cars.

But thirty-five. It’s a strange age. The primary danger at thirty-five is there is a tendency to commit the grievous error of allowing the mind to write a check the body can’t cash, to quote an unnamed philosopher.

Drinking. At thirty-five, you begin to find out all the bad things that are supposed to happen to you if you drink too much certainly will.

Sex. Thirty-five is the first time you realize you can go six months without it and it won’t kill you.

Money. Thirty-five is when you realize even if it did grow on trees, something else would probably own all the trees.

Ambition. By the time you’re thirty-five you are about ready to settle for what you can get.

At thirty-five, I’d had three wives. We’ve been over that already. At thirty-five, I’d also had twice that many jobs and some fine dogs.

The best dog I’d ever owned was a basset hound named “Plato.” Basset hounds are wonderful dogs. If you feel bad, they always look like they feel worse.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve always gotten along better with dogs than with women. Dogs don’t seem to want as much. Come home in the middle of the night and a dog won’t ask you where you’ve been or how much money you’ve spent or why you hadn’t called.

A dog is satisfied with the fact you’re there at all.

I lost my basset hound Plato to my first wife in a custody battle. She took him to live with her and the next I heard of him, he had died. But the dog had class to the end.

“He came down with cancer in his old age,” my first wife wrote me. “One morning, he went to the refrigerator and began to beg for food. I gave him a raw hot dog. He took it out to a little creek behind the house where he liked to play. It was a hot day. He sprawled out in the cool water, finished off the hot dog, and died.”

Class.

I didn’t sleep much those last two weeks. It seemed like a waste of time somehow. I still shook the bed. My wife was a trooper. She endured the bed shaking. She endured the restlessness. She endured the awful attack of sentimentality that struck me. The future seemed at least slightly suspect at the time, so I dealt mostly with the past.

My past. Thirty-five years of it. Wives and dogs. A career. Family. My mother. She’s been ill for so long herself. Something called scleroderma. It attacked her esophagus. She taught first grade nearly thirty years before the illness forced her retirement. That long with first graders is enough to make anyone sick, I suppose.

When I told my mother, who had only one child, I would be having heart surgery, she said to make sure my underwear was clean when I went to the hospital.

Mothers. Their love is the best love.

The first grade students called my mother, their teacher, “Miss Christine.” I called her, and still do, “Mama.” She began teaching in my school, Moreland Elementary in Moreland, Georgia, when I was in the second grade, and if your mother happens to be on the faculty of your school, it is difficult for you because the other students think you get special treatment, and if you do anything wrong, your teachers will say to you, “Your mother taught you better than this,” because they presume a teacher’s child has been taught better than to flush a cherry bomb down a school commode just to hear the marvelous, thunderous sound the subsequent explosion will make.

Sammy Whitten and I once flushed a cherry bomb down each of the four commodes in the boys’ restroom of Moreland School. I ran. He stayed to see the water explode out of the commodes. Sammy Whitten was captured by school authorities at the scene. I am forever indebted to him for not fingering his accomplice. All he ever asked in return was half my lunch the next five years we were in school together.

The school drew children from the town of Moreland which was no town at all. We got other children, too, from out in the county. Sawmill kids. Pulpwood cutter kids. Sheet rocker kids. Sharecropper kids. Kids with no shoes. Kids in tattered overalls. Kids on free lunches.

It was at this point in my life that I noticed poverty for the first time. The term, in those days, for poor people was “white trash.” Real bad white trash was “lowdown white trash” and white trash even worse than that was “sorry white trash.” Sorry white trash lived in whatever it could find, like dogs, and ate from garbage cans and slept five and six to a bed and married their first cousins and all traveled in a broken down car and didn’t bathe.

Some sorry white trash moved on the outside of town when I was about to enter the fifth grade. Their name was Hadley. There was an old man and an old woman. They looked like the last time they saw soap, it was heading in the other direction. They had a mess of children around them, too—four, five, or six of them. Some were their kids, some were their grandchildren whose parents had run off. The old man drove an old rattletrap, of course, and it sunk low in the back and burned oil and the stuffings and springs were coming out of the seat covers.

My friend Danny Thompson and I walked down near the Hadley house one day because Danny, who had seen “lowdown white trash” had never really seen any “sorry white trash.” But the dogs got after us before we could get too close.

White trash, no matter what level, always attracted dogs. Yard dogs. Dogs that like to crawl under trucks on hot days and get oil all over their backs. One way to distinguish a yard dog from a regular dog: Call a regular dog and he’ll come at you nose first with at least some degree of enthusiasm. Yard dogs come with a sideways gait, backing and shying, in case there’s a boot to dodge when they get there.

The year was 1956. Don Larsen pitched his perfect game that year. Luckily for us, Danny Thompson and I thought, there were no Hadleys joining us in the fifth grade.

“Any new students in your class?” my mother asked me at supper the night after the first day of classes.

“Few, but none of those sorry, white trash Hadleys,” I said.

My mother, incidentally, was not aware of the categorization of white trash, nor of white trash at all, for that matter.

She made me leave the kitchen without my dinner and I was told never to refer to anyone as “sorry” or “trash” again. Then she did something even worse to me.

“When I go to the Hadley’s,” my mother said, “you’re going with me.”

Mama did have a Hadley in her class in the first grade. His name was Sammy, she said. He was blond and he had blue eyes. He didn’t talk much, she said, but when she had sent him home for the day, he had, without a word, hugged her around the neck. And, Mama had to visit the Hadleys because school regulations required that each teacher visit the home of each child in her class, in order to meet the parents and get a firsthand view of the homelife.

I offered Danny Thompson the half of my lunch Sammy Whitten wasn’t getting to go along with me, but he said he heard those people carried bad diseases and he didn’t want to catch one.

When Mama and I drove up to the Hadleys, the dogs came down off the porch where they had been sitting with the children on the car seat, the one with the stuffings and the springs coming out. The little brown dog yapped some, but he was too small to be of any threat, and the two big dogs had a lot of mileage on them. They had come down out of natural yard dog hospitality.

Four children—one, a toddler in last week’s diapers; another, a couple of years older; another, maybe five, with lots of sores on his hands and face; and then a smiling, blue-eyed child of six, he would be Sammy, continued to stare at us from the porch.

“Hi, Sammy,” said my mother. “These your brothers and sisters?” Sammy nodded, yes.

Two older children then appeared in the front door. One was a girl, twelve maybe; the other, a boy, her older brother. He could have been fifteen. According to the boy, they were aunt and uncle to the younger children whose mother, their sister, had split with a truck driver three months earlier and “didn’t have no head for ever comin’ back.”

Mr. Hadley emerged. Even his hands were angry hands. I moved closer to my mother.

“I’m Miss Christine, Mr. Hadley,” said my mother. I marveled at the way she spoke straight at him, politely, like he was a preacher and not, as I thought to myself, sorry white trash.

“I’m Sammy’s teacher,” she went on, “and it is the policy of the school that I visit with you and tell you of Sammy’s progress and attitude in the classroom.”

I knew my mother would have the good sense to discuss all this on the front porch and not move inside that awful house.

“Could we go inside to discuss this, Mr. Hadley?” asked my mother.

Mr. Hadley, with one shake of his giant, hairy, dirty, angry hand, motioned us inside.

More automobile seats from a raid on a junkyard. Crates, Tables with a leg missing. Lanterns. Fireplace. Feed company calendar on the wall—the only decoration. July showing in the shank of September.

There are sounds of movement in the other room, the kitchen perhaps. Must be Mrs. Hadley. She emerges. Ma Kettle after fighting a forest fire all night.

My mother rises. “Mrs. Hadley?” my mother greets her.

The woman nods and defers to her husband.

“You want to talk about Sammy?” he asks.

“You’re his father, Mr. Hadley?”

“Grandpaw. His maw run off. She wasn’t no count and she run off. Don’t know who his paw was. Could’a been any one of a bunch of ’em.”

“Your occupation, Mr. Hadley?”

“Sawmill hand.”

It was at this point I notice Mr. Hadley has no teeth. I check Mrs. Hadley. She has no teeth, either. Older boy’s and older girl’s teeth appear to be in serious jeopardy, too.

Sammy, the one with the blond hair and the blue eyes, is still outside, but he is half-peering through the open door. He senses the conversation has to do with him.

My mother is handling this well. The place smells of burning tires. My mother sits there quietly asking questions about the Hadley family’s medical history.

“Heart disease?”

“No.”

“Mental disorders?”

“Had a cousin went crazy once. He got run over by a train.”

“Diabetes?”

“Don’t let my kids get close enough to no bad dogs to get no diabetes.”

“You’re thinking about rabies, Mr. Hadley.”

“Diabeetees, raybeetees, don’t want these kids gettin’ bit by no bad dogs.”

Undaunted, my mother moves on.

“Sammy, I’m sure you will like to know, is very cooperative at school. He seems to be able to concentrate for long periods, and I think that will be very beneficial to him.”

I can see Sammy inch his face a little farther into the open door. My mother is continuing to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Hadley. Mrs. Hadley, I get the impression, last spoke in the late thirties and, probably, was reprimanded for that.

“The only problem with him seems to be that I can’t get him to open up and talk. I’d like for him to be more verbal in the classroom. Do you notice his lack of participation in conversation at home?”

Mr. Hadley has had enough.

“Teacherlady,” he begins. “I ain’t never been to no school myself. Ain’t had time, trying to raise all these young’uns. My wife can read and write well enough to get both us by. All I know is if you want Sammy to talk, you do what I do. You beat it out of him.”

With that, Mr. Hadley reaches over the fireplace and produces a leather strap bound to a crude wooden handle.

“You take this here with you to school, teacherlady. You want him to shut his mouth, you pop his butt with this strap. You want one to open his mouth, you do the same. That’s what I made this here thing for. Children ought to be whooped if they don’t mind.

“Sammy, come here!” Mr. Hadley beckons the youngster peering from the door. The child comes quickly.

“Show the teacherlady what happened to you last week when I asked you a question and you wouldn’t answer it.”

Sammy, embarrassed but obedient, pulls off his tattered shirt, revealing the welts of a beating.

My mother is very calm.

“I don’t think I need such a thing to convince my students to talk or to be quiet, Mr. Hadley,” she says sternly. I would have given up my after-school candy money for the rest of my educational career to have at that moment seen my mama take that strap to Mr. Hadley.

My mother excused herself, thanked the Hadley’s for their time, and said to Sammy as she left, “I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

Sammy smiled timidly.

We were back in our car. The dogs had left us and had gone back to the porch. I was first to see him coming.

“It’s Sammy, Mama,” I said.

He was running, his blond bangs falling over his face, over his blue eyes. He came to the door on the driver’s side, and my mother opened it for him.

He never said a word to either of us. He just stood there, looking up at my mother, begging her, craving her, needing her.

Then, he jumped into her arms, into our car, into her lap, and his arms locked tightly around her neck and he squeezed her and then as quickly as he had come, he was gone again, trotting back up the stairs to the rotting porch and into the rotting house.

My mother didn’t cry then. But I heard her crying later. In the night, she cried because she still felt those little arms tight around her neck and still saw those welts on Sammy’s back.

One day Sammy wasn’t at school anymore and there was no trace of him at any other county school, and my mother even went to far as to check state records, but she found no trace of the Hadley’s whereabouts.

It was a year or so later. We were deep into the Georgia winter and my mother sat in our living room, staring out the front window into the a howling, cold night. We had eggs and grits and homemade biscuits with sorghum syrup for supper. My mother always cooked eggs and grits and biscuits on cold nights.

She continued to stare into the dark.

“I wonder if little Sammy is warm right now,” she said, suddenly.

Later, in the deep secret of her night, she cried again for little Sammy.

My daddy. He died when I was twenty-three, when he was fifty-eight. I spent a lot of time in those weeks before surgery looking at a picture of him I keep on my desk in my basement. He is wearing the uniform of the United States Army.

I never really knew the man. He came back from World War II and married my mother. In 1946, they did their part for the war baby boom. We moved around a lot those first years, and then Korea broke out and my father went back to war.

“The first time I went,” I can remember him saying, “I was young and it was a great adventure. When I went back the second time, I already knew about the hell I was getting into.”

One man, two wars. He was an infantryman, and he was a fine solder. I still have the Bronze Star, the citation for his battlefield commission, the Purple Hearts. Years after his death, I ran into a war buddy of his.

“Your daddy was as brave a man as I ever met,” he said. “He was good with the kids, the nineteen-year-olds who went in first. He led them through France. He knew the odds against him. Every night, we would talk and every night he would say, ‘I know I’m going to die tomorrow.’ He drank up France—trying to get that thought off his mind.”

Six years after surviving France he was commanding a rifle company in Korea. He told the story often. I remember every word:

“We were near a rice paddy, about to move out. Suddenly, the rice paddy started shooting at us. There were gooks everywhere.

“The Germans were easier to fight than these people. You could figure out what a German would do. In many ways, he was like an American. He feared death. Not the gooks. They would come in waves. You kill a thousand, another thousand would be there to take their place.

“It was nearly dark. They turned spotlights on us. They blew horns and whistles and shot off firecrackers and they screamed, and they kept coming and they kept coming.

“We fought through the night. They were tearing us apart. We managed to dig a small trench. Maybe twenty of us were left. At daybreak, a mortar barrage hit directly in the trench. It took a kid’s head clean off. The head rolled away from the kid’s body.

“I will never forget looking at that face. It smiled. I swear that face had a smile on it. The chaplain was still alive. He looked up at me and said, ‘Captain, you have just seen a man go to heaven.’”

More mortars came flying in. There was more death. The gooks overran the camp.

“I was still in the trench,” my father would go on, his listeners enthralled. I don’t know how much was embellishment. Very little, I suppose. Combat usually leaves little to the imagination.

“I was cut and I was bleeding, but I was alive. I figured they would find me still breathing and shoot me. I resigned myself to it. I wondered if my body would ever get back home. When we buried my mama, there was a place near her. I remember looking at that place and thinking that’s where I’d like to go when my own time came.

“I crawled near two dead bodies that were lying close to each other. I put my head face down with my nose in my helmet. I didn’t want them to see my breath move the dirt in the trench.

“I heard rounds being fired. They were shooting the wounded, the bastards. Two gooks jumped into the trench. They began kicking bodies. They kicked the two bodies next to me, but they never kicked me. I don’t know why. I was praying. I said, ‘God, if they kick me, don’t let me move, don’t let me make a sound.’

“The gooks never touched me. They left me with the dead. I didn’t move, even after I was positive they had left. When I finally crawled out of the trench, I couldn’t believe I had been spared. We’d been wiped out. I found one other soldier, another kid, who was alive. But he had been wounded. I picked him up and started walking with him in my arms. I had no idea where I was going. I just walked. When I got so tired I couldn’t walk any longer, I sat the kid down and leaned him against a tree. He was unconscious. I leaned against the tree, myself, and went to sleep. When I woke up, it was dark again and the kid was dead.”

So he wandered, stunned and alone.

“At daybreak, I came over a hill. I spotted a Korean boy standing a few yards in front of me. He had a grenade in his hands. I don’t know where he got it, probably off a dead soldier. I scared him, I guess. He pulled the pin on the grenade and threw it at me. I hit the ground. I felt the explosion and I took shrapnel in the back of my head and in my neck. I blacked out.

“When I woke up, I was in some sort of lean-to. The Korean boy was wiping the blood off my face and neck. He was South Korean and hadn’t realized I was an American. That’s all I could figure had happened. That’s twice I should have been dead in a day. And some people say there’s no God.”

He hid in the lean-to for six weeks. A Papa-san, an old Korean man, maybe the boy’s grandfather, brought him water and cold rice. Occasionally, he could hear enemy troops walking and talking near the lean-to. He dared not come out, not even to relieve himself.

It was dreadfully cold. His feet were frostbitten.

When the Korean boy thought it was safe, he led my father back to the American lines.

“I would have run back,” he said, “but my feet were so swollen, it was like walking on two basketballs.”

I remember the day the telegram came that said my father was missing in action. My mother cried. She tried to explain to me. I was five, so I cried, too. I didn’t know exactly why I was crying, but when my mother pulled me to her, I wanted to share every inch of her grief.

Later, the word came that my father was alive. He called soon afterwards from a hospital in Pearl Harbor. My mother and I cried again. When he stepped off the train at Union Station in Atlanta, we met him with boxes of fried chicken and cathead country biscuits, and I sat in his lap and he squeezed me and that night, that incredible night, he came to the bed where I was sleeping and he picked me up and he took me to his bed and he put me down between himself and my mother and they reached their arms over me to each other. There has been no such peace and security in my soul since.

I don’t know what happened to the man. Everybody who knew him had a theory. He couldn’t sleep. He would come again to me at nights, and pick me up and hold me and I would rub the back of his head and feel the tiny bits of metal still lodged there from the Korean boy’s grenade.

And he drank. First, it was nightly cocktails at the Officer’s Club, but it graduated to benders. He had tried to drink up France. Now he was taking a shot at Fort Benning, Georgia.

The Army forsook him. They called him unfit. I think back to his feet. They bled so badly after he came home from Korea. Every night, he took off blood-soaked socks. And they called him unfit.

He took to the road. This job, that job. The man had talent. Big voice. Military bearing. Played the piano. Name it, he could charm it. Name a bank, and he could cash a check on it, which is why the road beckoned so often.

My mother divorced him. She had no choice. I was seven. I saw him a couple of times a year after that. He could always make me laugh.

They called me one morning from the hospital in the little town of Claxton, Georgia. He had collapsed on the street. He was already in a coma when I got there.

I had never seen anybody die before. It wasn’t like in the movies. He was in a deep sleep, and he took a breath, and then he didn’t take another one. A nurse came into the hospital room and checked for his pulse and said there wasn’t any. She called in a doctor who verified the lack of a pulse. My father’s face was very blue. I held his hand and cried. I let his hand go when the doctor pulled the sheet over his head.

They said he died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia. No, he didn’t. He died from the effects fighting two wars can have on a man.

Those nights before my surgery that I sat alone with his picture, I took on my fear, the fear of the pain that was ahead of me, the fear of death, and of something else that was even a worse fear, somehow.

Brand it macho, if you will, but I was thirty-five years old and I had carried around a burden or two, but there had been no real test of my courage, no challenge that had come close to this.

As I faced my first, gut-wrenching moment of truth, I was afraid I wouldn’t take it like a man.

The picture helped. My own father. He led men into battle. He faked death out of its shorts too many times to count, and then he fought the booze and bad dreams and he didn’t give up until something you can’t find without a microscope felled him from the blind side.

If he could do all that, I assured myself, then I could do this.

A couple of days before I checked into the hospital, I drove out to the little cemetery where my father is buried, which is all I could do with the urge to thank him.

I’d never been so grateful that we had decided to put him in the place next to his mama.