Mrs. Herman, Judy’s mother, appeared at assembly one morning to thank us for our kindness toward her daughter. She wore one of those hats where the pheasant feather curves all the way around to the back. Anyone with a straw of conscience bent over in his seat in an attitude of mortification. Thank God the posture could be taken for reverence. You focused on the feather because otherwise you’d be sick. We had not been kind to her daughter. Some of us had been neutral, harmless, as it were, but search as we might we could not find one person who had actually been her friend. Some of us scanned Mrs. Herman’s face for the scalding irony that should have been there. Not a trace. The woman was straightforward as a wife on a radio play.
“. . . and I know all is in God’s hands, and that you will not blame yourself for the terrible thing that happened. All ways are mysterious, and none more so than the ways of youth.” She was eloquent, really, her wide brow clear under pale brown hair. She looked like her daughter, and maybe her daughter’s skin would have cleared and she would have grown up to be a handsome woman.
Judy and her mother had been working on a project together, which she had completed alone and meant to present to the school as a gift and memorial. It was a quilt of the North Carolina flag. She held it by the top edge and let it unroll toward the floor. The gasp from some of the girls was genuine. It was quite lovely. And then she said, “Will one of Judy’s special friends come down and accept this gift on behalf of Rickenbacker High?” The smile on her face could have lit a campfire. I have lived life not devoid of embarrassment, but that moment was the worst of all. Agonizing. Excruciating. But in less time than it probably seemed, someone was moving down the aisle. It was Sherry. Of course it was Sherry, beaming a smile back to match Mrs. Herman’s. God had given me the best girl in the world. This time she saved us all. Sherry took one side of the quilt and motioned for Mrs. Herman to take the other, and they held it up before us all. When Sherry nodded we knew we were meant to applaud.
The quilt went up in the lobby opposite the dining hall, where everybody would see it all the time. It hung there in lone splendor for a while, but then Mrs. Herman began to do an odd thing. She began to gather remnants and remembrances of all the Rickenbacker kids (and those who’d gone to Borderland High before the name was changed) who had died before they graduated. She got the principal to get the janitor to set up a cabinet like a trophy cabinet, and into the cabinet went sad little tokens of lives cut short: Chancel Beatty’s gym shirt from the day he collapsed at recess and could not be revived; Clarence Burden’s varsity letter; Timmy Hanson’s ball cap; Anita Coleman’s bracelet with the single cultured pearl hanging like a dewdrop. When long-grieving relatives heard of the project, they sent items and pictures in tarnished brass frames. The collection grew. Kids die of all sorts of things, but what was creepy was how many of us had died on the Falls or in the gorge. One in every generation, at least, just as the local wisdom prophesied. The principal turned his countenance against it, saying it was “morbid” and that youth is a time not to think about such things (he’d evidently forgotten about the War, just two years in the past), but we overruled him by simply standing in the lobby and looking our fill, quiet for once, contemplative. When I dropped by Glen’s parents’ house to see if they had a token of his they’d like to enshrine, it was the first time I realized they were gone, slipping away between one day and another with a word, so far as I knew, to no one.
Mrs. Herman attended graduation. She stood up and received applause when her daughter’s name was called and after it the words, “In memoriam.” We had forgotten the tormented Judy-mouse haunting the halls, and remembered her as her mother did, the belle of the ball. Maybe that had been Mom’s goal all along.
And then we were high school graduates. Dad gave me two weeks to lounge around in the June sun before I joined him in the hardware store. I took two days. He said nothing. He handed me a brand new apron he had been saving for the moment. I thought how Mom and Dad had been with me all the time, through everything, unvarying, unwavering, root and stone, and I had to turn my face away for a minute.
It’s not that Sherry never said she intended to become a teacher, nor is it that I didn’t take her seriously. It’s that I didn’t know exactly what becoming a teacher involved. I knew Nancy McWhirter had gone to college, but she was an outsider, and I assumed that if you were an outsider you had to go to college, but if you were a local as clearly brilliant as Sherry you just moved right in to a vacant position at the school. No, I didn’t assume that. I gave it no thought at all. I talked from time to time about being this or that—a pilot or a diver or a cop like Andy, but I had no real ambition or desire to take it beyond talk. Sherry talked about being a teacher in the very same tone, and yet she damn well meant to be exactly that. That Sherry would have to choose between me and a profession never crossed my mind, and that she would not choose me was not even a remote possibility. Yet, that’s what happened. She wouldn’t have said it this way. She would say that she just asked me to wait a little while she finished her course work in Cullowhee. I am one of those people who takes a setback for defeat. I sobbed myself to sleep because my time with Sherry was over and I wanted no one else. One minute after noon is night.
She suggested I come along and get a college degree. With her. Leave my home and move . . . to a strange mountain beside a strange river. I couldn’t get my head around that. I intended from my first consciousness to work with my dad in the Summers Family Feed and Hardware, take it over some day, and I could no more have deviated from that than flown to the moon. Sherry somehow took her refusal to stay with me and mine to go with her as equivalent. I didn’t get that at all.
She invited me to visit her at Western for Homecoming, and I did, and we had a good time (she even agreed to leave the dance and make out in her room after about an hour of stupid big-band rumbas), so the pain of rejection began to soften. My suspicion that she was humoring me until she could break away clean lessened, and my fear that she would think me a rube after hanging out with philosophers and mathematicians grew. There was no pleasing me. I would be content relationship-wise only when we were married. I told her this and she said, “You mean, only when you own me.” She was smiling, so I didn’t know whether she was serious.
I did sort of mean that, but I intended for her to own me too.
That was the bad after graduation. The good was that I was, as I always suspected I would be, happy as a pig in shit helping Dad run the store. I adored measuring out the nails and matching the bolts and jamming the big scoops into the bins of seed and setting up the lighted pens for the baby chicks at the end of winter. I ran toward the people coming to the door, desiring to hear what they wanted, desiring to feel myself getting it for them. I made keys and repaired engines and sharpened blades and, after a while, chose what bulbs to get in for the local gardeners in October. I stopped ordering hammer X because hammer Y was a better value, and I trusted myself to know the difference. Dad was so proud he didn’t know where to look. At the business end, I was more up to date than he was, having taken the two business courses offered at the high school. But Dad was way better at talking to the people. I wanted to know what they needed and how I could get it to them. Dad wanted to know how the pig barn was holding up, and was Granny still poorly, and how were those feed bins working? I could do three customers to his every one, but after a while I learned that was not the point. I learned that you could, if you wanted to, retain obscure details of people’s lives and repeat them back to them when they came into the store next time, and that this would make them happy. Some called me by my dad’s name, as though there would be no interruption from one generation to another. This made me proud.
So, that’s the bad and the good. The weird was Vince. UT was not that far away, and yet, after the first few weeks of fall practice, we heard nary a word from or about him. I called him at the university, but could never quite get connected. The university switchboard operator started saying he wasn’t there, but I knew better. He was the star of their football team. I ran into Coach in the grocery store and tried to ask him about his son, but I got a wave of the hand to part me from him as though I had bad breath. Maybe I did. I decided to let that pass. But something about the exchange made me determined to get news of my best friend, so I strolled to the Silvano house when I knew Coach would be at school. I didn’t even need to knock. Mrs. Silvano was sitting on the top step of the front porch with a cigarette in her hand at the end of an extended arm resting on her left knee the whole duration of my approach down the sidewalk, so whether she were actually smoking it or not, I didn’t know. Beside her was a tumbler of clear brown liquid which she moved behind her into semi-concealment when she realized I was coming up her walk.
“Mrs. Silvano!”
“Hello there. If you’re the paper boy you’ll have to come back when—”
“It’s Arden Summers. Remember? Vince’s friend?”
She stared like she thought I was lying. “It’s the middle of the day . . . well, of course you’ve graduated, haven’t you?”
“Yes ma’am. Same year as Vince.”
“Well, isn’t that nice?” She drew the cigarette to her lips but did not quite take a drag on it before she let her arm fall again. That cigarette must have weighed a ton. Mrs. Silvano was thin and angular in a fashionable way. She was dressed pretty well for somebody just hanging around the house in the middle of the day. One leg was crossed over the other all ladylike, enabling a posture whereby she could support that cigarette on one knee.
“Arden, Arden,” she said. “Aren’t you in college? I think one of Vince’s friends is down at Duke.”
“That’s Tilden, ma’am.”
“He was a good boy. He playing ball?”
“No ma’am. He is studying physics.”
“Physics!” She drew the word out as though it were the most amazing concept ever encountered. “You? You’re still playing ball, I hope. Vincent loves his boys so much.”
“I’m working at my dad’s store.”
“Of course you are. HARD-WARE.” The word made her laugh. She laughed a little throaty laugh, paused, and then laughed again at a rather jarring volume. I didn’t know what to do. I waited for it to be over.
“Things going OK for you?”
“Peachy.” I waited for a moment. She said, “Harris.”
“That’s my dad.”
“I know. I just . . . I just got a clear image of him. Like he was sending me a message or something. You don’t favor him much. “
“I look more like my mom.”
“Don’t remember her.” She lifted the cigarette again, and this time she took a long drag, held it, blew a blue stream of smoke into the air. “It’s your dad I remember. Harris. We grew up together. All of us. Oh, I remember Harris Summers.” She laughed as she had over “hardware,” first perfunctory, then chaotic. After the laugh she had a coughing fit. I waited for it to be over. I thought about asking what the hell she meant, but I remembered one of life’s rules is not to ask questions you don’t want the answers to.
When she seemed to be recovered I said, “Well, I wondered. I haven’t heard from Vince . . . and . . . I wondered . . . if I could get his school address from you. He’s been so mysterious! I’m my own boss now . . . don’t tell my dad I said that . . . and I wanted to drive up . . . maybe pay him a visit . . . me and Sherry . . . if I could . . .”
The look on her face was odd, as if there were a whole array of things to be said and she had to choose but one of them. She took another drag of the cigarette, coughed once, hard and sharp. Then she said, “No. I don’t think that would be a very good idea at all.”
Sherry didn’t take much convincing, though we had to wait until she could take a long weekend. She hitched a ride with a girlfriend up from Cullowhee, then we were off to Knoxville with some little sandwiches her mother had made, like the kind you have at weddings, with olives and cream cheese and weird stuff in them. If we ever got married it was going to be a mixed marriage, bologna and white bread on one side, tiny ethnic smelly cheesy assortments cut into shapes on the other. I loved her anyway.
We’d set aside a whole weekend to spend with Vince. We didn’t need it. Vince was not at UT, just like the switchboard operator had said. He got there, he practiced a few weeks with the team, looked good. Then he started getting queer. This is the evaluation of his roommate, a second-year linebacker who weighed about three hundred pounds: “queer.”
Sherry said, “How do you mean ‘queer’?”
Girls were not allowed in the dorms, so we stood in the lobby, catching the taint of male sweat subliming from the interior. Freddy the Linebacker said, “You know. Crybaby. Homesick, I guess. Something like that. He picked a fight with me and I didn’t say anything. He picked a fight with Coach and that was the end of it.”
“He fought his dad?”
I hadn’t remembered where I was. Freddy’s uncomprehending stare brought me back to the present.
“You take a swing at one of the coaches and there’s just no place for you. He spent a night in jail.”
“He spent—”
“Yeah. Coach is big on lesson-teaching. He was flunking out anyway.”
“Your coach was flunking out?”
“Silvano was. Went to class maybe once.”
I didn’t know where to take it from there. We chit-chatted about expectations for the UT team that year and whatnot. Freddy revealed that he wanted to be a business major, but there was some test he had to take first, and wouldn’t I take it for him because nobody knew me there. I said I would and gave him an imaginary address to write to when the time neared. Sherry said she was worried by how my deviousness had become almost reflexive.
I said, “It’s because I’m hungry.”
“You ate enough of those sandwiches.”
“It’s not possible to eat enough of those sandwiches.”
About ten miles below Knoxville, Sherry said, “That’s not what you expected to hear, is it?”
“Nope. I thought Vince was just—”
“You thought he was the General MacArthur of college football now and had no time for his small town friends anymore.”
“Yes. I wish it had been that.”
About twenty miles below Knoxville, Sherry said, “Tell me something.”
“Yeah?”
“Did you hear what he called you?”
“Who? The linebacker? I never told him my name.”
“I know. He called you Glen. Twice.”
Some time later I did get the long-awaited call from Vince. His voice sounded tired and young, as though he’d been growing backwards away from us. I watched a gang of crows feeding on something in the backyard while I talked to him. The two things seemed related in a way I can’t describe.
“Ardo.”
“Man, where the hell have you been?”
“Oh . . . man. A long story. Just let me . . . I just want to hear the sound of your voice.”
When I realized that was exactly what he meant, I talked, about Sherry, about the high school, about the town, about the new gizmos Dad had gotten into the store and relied on me to figure out. One was the first TV anybody had in our town, for sale to anyone who had the money, with me to explain and assemble and maybe repair a little. Vince was not forthcoming about his own life, except to tell me where he was calling from. In a time when you actually paid for long distance, the remoteness of a call could be a measure of friendship, and I boasted to Sherry that my best friend had plunked down cash to phone me from St. Louis.
“What’s in St. Louis?”
“Glen.”
I don’t know. Maybe he went looking for Glen. It was something you could never know for sure. Connections were bad in the mountains. Vince’s voice on the line came and went like a ghost . . . twice, three times . . . and then it stopped.
The high school was the big thing in our town, so its news was our news. You could read in the Watauga Advertiser of the opening preparations for the celebration people were planning to honor Coach’s twentieth anniversary. He’d coached only sixteen years, but they counted the four years he played under Coach Andonian and ignored the four intervening years he’d spent at Auburn. Chairwomen were chosen for this and that committee. Funds were solicited. Pledges were pledged. It was still a long way off, so I decided not to pay that much attention, though my alumnus invitation to the big banquet arrived almost immediately—in the hope, I suppose, that I would help or contribute money. I’d be there for sure. I could idolize Coach with greater purity now that I wasn’t around him every day.
The other source of excitement was the matter of the school mascot. School mascots had not been common in our part of the world. You were known by your town (in a place where most towns had only one high school) or your colors, but one by one the regional schools began to call themselves the Catamounts or the Spartans or what have you. I guess they picked this up from the North. Anyhow, our being Eddie Rickenbacker High, “The Aces” won hands-down in a single ballot. All this was set up to happen at the same time: the assumption of a nickname, the unfurling of all the new banners and modeling of all the new uniforms, and the honoring of the winningest coach in our corner of the world. Little towns like ours are asleep most of the time, but when we wake, we are relentless.
I walked into the store and saw, on a poster the size of a mattress, that Summers Family Feed and Hardware was a main sponsor of Coach’s big do. Dad is not a talker, so it took me a while to figure out why he was so enthused about this. I knew he and Coach had been buddies as Vince and I were, but you never attribute the same keenness of emotion to other generations as you do to your own. Vince Jr. and I have been buddies since before we remember. Dad has pictures of us playing together in my grandpa’s backyard, under the colossal sweet gum, from when we looked pretty much alike, as babies do. The sweet gum tree had remained unchanged from the time when somebody took a photo of my dad and Vince’s dad in the very same spot, looking like us, looking like their sons would a quarter century later, all Marine-cut heads and ears and white T-shirts. The boys are a little older in my dad’s picture, and holding onto things that help to explain their lives. Vince’s dad is holding a football, as he was going to pretty much forever after. My dad was holding onto a book. You can read the title of the book through the fingers of his chubby little hand. The book is The Official Boy Scout Book of Home Repairs. Those two objects summarized what their lives would become. You’d think only in a movie would one turn out to be the high school football coach and the other the owner of the town hardware store, but that is exactly what happened. Copies of that photo endured in both houses, one on our kitchen wall, one in the Silvano hallway, as if it had been a kind of diploma, or a contract sealing a partnership, whatever came after. The point is Dad and Coach were friends from youth, when friendship first meant something. Men of that generation sometimes waited a good while for a means to show love that would abash neither party.
Many things became clear when that relationship became clear: how Dad would not allow me to call Coach a shithead even when he was; how Dad would once in a while reach out and caress Vinny in a way that puzzled me—in the sense of making me absurdly jealous—until I realized that for a moment Dad was not seeing my friend, but his own twenty years before; how Dad was never surprised when I told him about our adventures at the Falls or in the gorge of the Wyona, was never as worried as I expected him to be. This dismayed me a little, wondering why he wasn’t more protective of his precious second son. At some point I must have realized that he and Vince Silvano Sr. had been there in their time, watched the swifts in the tornado of their evening descent, heard the water running under the bent moon, had done what all their sons would do a generation before they did it. It was kind of beautiful not to have invented anything, really, but to have carried on a tradition older than any one person in the world. I was glad to be where I was. Every night until dead winter the swifts sank into the mountain and the bats beat out of it, and it was like a beating heart by which all things were made alive.
The Sanctified Brotherhood Church Hall was chosen for the banquet. More obvious places, like the school cafeteria, were out because they were in use every day and the sort of preparations the committees planned needed to gather to a greatness untouched. The nine or ten of the Sanctified Brotherhood who remained could probably manage to keep out of the basement for a couple of weeks. Everyone in town had once been Sanctified Brotherhood, and the drafty dark 1816 church took up most of what would have been a city block, had our town been a city. I don’t know what the Sanctified Brotherhood believed distinct from what other folks believe, but only that, long before I came into the world, most of them had stopped believing it. Still, it was rich somehow, the church was, and kept going long after there seemed to be no point. Maybe it had kept itself alive so it could host this one last grand to-do.
Stupendous was the achievement of the town ladies, the Boosters and the alumnae and the mothers of current Rickenbacker Aces, in the decorating of the Sanctified Brotherhood basement. That sort of thing was strictly gender-specific, and though men were present to handle the tools, they drilled where the women told them to drill and hammered where the women told them to hammer. The celebration of males in a male activity curiously overflowed with female energy. Walls were covered with brown butcher paper painted with the very mountains that could be seen if one walked out the front door. The paintings were fine, shockingly so, as if years of pent-up artistic energy had come pouring out at this one moment. My dad donated the paint and solvents and brushes and various kinds of adhesive, but the women worked, with their hair tied up in bandanas, floors covered in torn and stained sheets from the laundry room, doors propped open to let the toxic fumes out into the air. Women we had never seen before came to the store to replenish their supplies. They didn’t ask advice even once. I didn’t understand how they could know what they needed without men around to tell them. I worried that they had been taking their custom elsewhere, but Dad said women had a way of controlling things without themselves being present, and so they never had to go to the hardware store at all if they didn’t want to.
Tree limbs got dragged down from the hills, balanced in pails, and covered with paper blossoms intricately folded. Sunday schools and funeral parlors and classrooms were emptied of chairs and folding tables, which the school janitors set up after hours, rank on rank with the Honoree’s Table elevated at Upstage Center, just as in the movies. Florists in Johnson City and Jonesboro were alerted to be ready on the fateful day. Uniforms not currently in use got straight-pinned to the wall, helmets hung from the ceiling by strings as though they were enormous red fruit. Someone got the idea to simulate victory bonfires, so those fake fires you put in cardboard fireplaces at Christmas came out of attics all over town to make an unseasonal appearance, their pin-wheel flame-makers turning at various velocities so if you paid too much attention it would make you sick. Dad and I and some of the other men repaired, reinforced, suggested, but the women were in charge.
Mrs. Silvano served as the honorary head of everything, though she was . . . confused . . . and spent her time waving her hand vaguely at the decorations and saying how beautiful it all was. It was pretty much done two weeks in advance. Should the Russkies drop their bomb and the rest of civilization be wiped out, Coach’s jubilee could go on as planned upon our hidden mountain.
Sherry had a few weeks before she went back to her sophomore year at Western. My fears about her commitment to me faded some through the summer as we spent nearly every waking hour together. Tilden had flown overseas for the summer—Denmark, I think, or someplace where the physicists grew thick—so she was my main company. Even if she were sick of me, I needed her. I went to her house to watch her fold invitations and lick stamps. I could have helped her, but, as I say, the line between the work of men and the work of women was pretty clear in those days. It also gave me a rare chance to dominate the conversation, as at least part of the time her tongue was on a stamp or the back of an envelope. She looked at me with her golden eyes over the tops of the envelopes. It was very sexy.
She said, “I know something you don’t know.”
“Probably.”
“Wanna guess?”
“French.”
“Besides that.”
I grabbed at the envelope now in process, thinking it was something to do with that. She pulled it away and said, “No, it’s not that. I know where Vince is.”
“So do I.”
“You think you do. I have the address. I already sent him his invitation.”
“Where?”
“Gallipolis.”
“What the hell is Gallipolis?”
“It’s a little town in Ohio. The address is a high school. Arden, I think he’s coaching.”
I said, “God, that’s wonderful,” but I meant about the coaching. To be in Gallipolis, Ohio seemed, on the other hand, sad almost beyond expression.