Shifty's War

Maybe a young man needs to travel to another country before he fully appreciates his home. He needs to abandon everything familiar, you know, travel a road that heads another direction. Then it dawns on him how good he had it at first. He remembers all over again being a boy and the rasp of his daddy’s chin against his cheek, keeping within him that warmth of knowing his daddy would be home again after work. Or maybe he remembers the thick, salty smell of bacon sizzling in his mama’s pan, so different from the cold bean soup the chow cook just sloshed in his mess kit. A home filled with bacon smells and a father coming home each night is how it is for some boys growing up, some boys who have it real lucky. That’s how it was for me.

I was eight years old, nine maybe, and Daddy was walking softly off my left when he stopped fast in the bottom of a holler and held his hand up for me to do the same. He shaded his eyes then started walking again. We were hunting squirrels deep up on Frying Pan, the name given to the mountain Daddy’s folks had owned longer than anybody could remember. Two cabins squatted up on Frying Pan. Daddy’s family stayed up top in the smaller cabin in summers, then come winters they moved down to the bigger cabin on the river bottom where they was closer to town. I never lived in either of Frying Pan’s cabins myself; we lived in a rented house in town by the time I was born, but the mountain was still as much our land as our skin was our skin, and on that mountain of bounty was where we hunted our food.

I must explain that folks in southwest Virginia throw round the word holler a lot, but it don’t always mean yelling. A holler is a depression between two hills, like a valley, but not as deep. Frying Pan was filled with hollers, stacked on each other, and Daddy and I was climbing through these hollers to get to the top. I’d been to the summit plenty of times already in my young life and knew once we got there we were in for a treat. We’d look out and see more of the same thing, ridge after ridge, the sky coming down and brushing those mountaintops, coloring them blue. That’s why you hear of the Blue Ridge Mountains running through this state and others. Those mountains are blue for real. The sun rose as Daddy and me walked, our breathing hung smoky in the early air, and we inhaled the crisp, cool smell of soil and bark. Lots of trees cover Frying Pan. “Deciduous” was the big word Daddy used. It was early fall and those leaves flamed in their colors—yellows, oranges, rubies, and golds.

My heart pumped hard in my chest, I heard that—the blood flowing back of my eardrum—was that what Daddy was asking? We’d been hiking for some time already and I was glad to stop and rest. Daddy knew everything about hunting and shooting and he was schooling me in his ways. His name was Barnum Powers and he’d been a private in the 363rd Infantry during the First World War. He fired rifles through the Battle of St. Mihiel and came home alive to love Mama. She was a Scotch-Irish beauty named Audrey, and flowing somewhere deep in her bloodline was American Indian. I knew these things because Daddy told me, but that’s all I knew, particularly about his shooting ways, so I wrinkled my nose and said, “I don’t hear nothing, Daddy, nothing at all.”

Daddy hiked over to me, his movements whisperlike on the forest floor, and laid his hand thick but gentle over the top of my face. He spread his fingers once for me to see his eyes were shut, too, then gathered his fingers so all was dark. “You’re thinking about only what you know is true, son, but a good hunter uses more than his eyes, you know. Let me ask you again: What do you hear?”

“You’ll get the next one, you know,” Daddy said. His eyes were still closed. I don’t know if they were closed while he shot, or if he only closed them again afterward, like a man might do at a sacred place. He had heard that squirrel rustling through the leaves in the tree, same as I had, but he was more certain of what he heard. I didn’t ask more because Daddy was already walking to where the squirrel lay. He crouched over it and unsheathed his knife and I followed his motions. Squirrel is dark meat, flavorful and tender if young. Old squirrels are fit for stewing only, but Mama would brush butter on this in her roasting pan, and it’d make fine eating.

Daddy removed all four paws at the wrist joint. He used small, careful cuts to open the belly skin without nicking into the muscle wall. He cut down the insides through all four legs and around the rectum at the base of the tail. He handed me the knife and I stripped the skin away from the meat and cut the tail off at the bone. There were seven of us in our family and I knew that Daddy made a hundred dollars a month. In a boy’s figuring, I didn’t know if that was a heap or a little, but Mama said we ate on a dollar a day, and she stretched it hard to go that far, so these squirrels kept us fed. We ate ’em all the time, as well as Mama’s garden in season, chickens that we raised ourselves, and a hog or two we kept up on the hillside.

“People think hunting’s just being out walking in the woods, but it’s lots more than that. You see things. You hear things. You learn to know everything that moves around you. Might be squirrel, deer, turkey, grouse, might be another man, you know. So you aim well, and aim for the eyes. It means a smaller target, but you have to promise me this—quick, clean kills only. Understand?”

I nodded without knowing the total of what I was agreeing to, whether Daddy was referring to squirrel hunting only, or to something he learned during the war, or if he knew enough about the troubling ways of the world to fear that his son would someday need to fight similar battles as he had. Soon enough we had that squirrel dressed and were hiking the sides of the hollers again, Daddy and me, this time with me listening for more than I could see.

Daddy took me hunting a few more times, but mostly I was with my brothers, friends, or on my own. I’d head out before the sun rose, just like Daddy taught me, and start by looking fifty feet ahead, then scan left to right. Then I’d hike out further and scan right to left and so on, just like that. I practiced my blank stare, where you’re not looking at anything solid, but you become aware of everything in front of you all the way back to your shoulders. Daddy’s words about movement being the biggest giveaway became second nature to me, and I always had an ear inclined to what might be in the trees. I heard wind. I heard snow crunch. I heard raindrops. If a leaf fell behind me, I knew. Might have been a year after Daddy first took me hunting that I came into the house with two squirrels tucked under my arm. Daddy looked them over and said, “Well that’s pretty good shooting, son, you shot ’em both through the eyes, you know.” It was the best compliment he’d ever given me, and I never felt prouder.

Daddy soon told me I needed to buy my own ammunition, so that meant I needed to earn money. I didn’t know what a boy like me could do around our hometown of Clinchco. All the jobs were for men. Ever heard of Clinchco? Probably not. Picture a bunch of mountains all grouped together with narrow, winding roads lacing through them. Clinchco’s a little speck by the side of one of those roads, far in the southwest tip of the triangle of Virginia. If you climb high enough on any ridge round Clinchco and spit hard enough, you’ll cross one of three state lines and land it on Kentucky, Tennessee, or North Carolina. If you look on a map, you’ll see that Virginia’s midway up the country, but everybody still considers us part of the South. Not Deep South like Alabama, we don’t talk with as much drawl, but we ain’t Yankees, that’s for sure. If you travel about an hour away from Clinchco to the big town of Bristol, you’ll see tan-bricked houses with wide white Greek columns out front, built Southern style, and folks will be real neighborly and ask you your business or make it their business to find out. They’ll be belted solid in the Bible, maybe Methodist, or Baptist like our family, and they’ll believe in God and Jesus Christ and go to church more Sundays than not. Most of ’em vote Democrat on account of the labor unions, and they’ll expect you to work hard if you live among them. They’ll help you if you’re down on your luck, and smoke cigarettes on your porch, and they’ll feed you the best ham and baked beans you’ve ever eaten if you come to visit a spell.

Oh, I knocked on plenty doors around Clinchco looking for work, but it wasn’t no use. A fella needed to work for the company, and that was that. I’m talking the Clinchfield Coal Mine Company, which was much the only reason our little town ever existed. A few pioneers settled the area mid 1880s and built a grist mill; then come 1913, a railway pushed its way from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to Elkhorn City, Kentucky, and eighteen houses sprung up overnight. One of the railway contractors was a hefty fella named Moss, so that’s what our town was first named. Four years later a post office was built and folks wanted things renamed in honor of the mining company, which began operations that same year. So Moss was no more, and Clinchco now was, and the railroad brought in workers, and that’s the way our town began.

They came for jobs in all four of the original Clinchfield mines, hardscrabble folks from all over the globe—Greeks, Hungarians, Italians, blacks—mostly by route of Ellis Island; I grew up with a real smattering of ethnic kids. The company needed services for its workers, so it built a school and barber’s office, a church and store. That big ole store had everything in it, groceries, meat, clothes, furniture, and that’s the only place you shopped if you lived in Clinchco. The store had a post office in one end and a drug store on the other, and every year come first of December they’d stock a heap of toys in the front window for our delight. Clinchco, oh, it was a booming place in those years. Maybe two thousand people in its heyday, maybe three thousand, though if you travel there today, the boom is long over and about four or five hundred folks call it home now.

The company owned our house. The company paid you what they reckoned to pay. At first, Daddy received script. Then the company changed the system, and in the latter 1930s and early 1940s, Daddy was paid cash money, silver dollars. Come payday you’d see this armored truck drive up and two guards climb out with their guns drawn. Later in the 1940s, the company switched to credit cards. Daddy got his card, and how much it said was how much he spent.

Tennessee Ernie Ford wrote that song about a company store owning a man’s soul, but it didn’t feel that way for our family. Few folks in Clinchco ever complained out loud. Most was into hard work and good behavior. Wasn’t actually a police force in town, but we had a security guard. He’d make sure all the doors were locked and check the office buildings, things like that. One time some boys broke into the drugstore and were caught. Their families had to move away. So that’s what it was. Kids were taught to behave themselves. If you didn’t, your daddy lost his job.

Never even felt like we were poor, to me. It was the Great Depression, but most all the fathers I knew kept their jobs. Maybe a man worked at the Number 7 Coal Tipple, or he processed at Number 9. Plenty of folks round America had it worse than we did, but it wasn’t all smooth in Clinchco. Coal business goes by jumps, you know. It’ll go along with a lot of demand, then tables turn sudden-like. A lot of business depends on what they call lake orders—when lakes thaw up north, they haul coal across to sell it, but when lakes are frozen too long, then everything slows, and times get hard for a coal town. Daddy kept his job all through the Depression, thankfully, and he never worked down in the actual mines, thankfully. His job was superintendent of supplies, so he bought, stocked, and issued out the various parts the company needed to fix machinery, that’s what he did.

It took me a week or two of knocking on doors and coming up empty on jobs, but finally I figured I’d need to create my own work. So I found a cloth and turned over a wooden box and shined shoes outside the commissary. Grown-ups like it when a young boy’s polite, and pretty soon I earned enough to buy a real shoeshine kit. From then on I had it made. Every Saturday I coated and buffed those boots and shoes till they shined brown and black. Every dime I earned from my business went into bullets for shooting practice. Well, that’s not true; I kept a few coins for myself. Had heard of an experiment I wanted to try, you know, but was probably twelve years old before I had enough jingle in my pocket to give it a real go.

Me and a kid named Frank Powers went into the woods one day to test the experiment. Frank had the same last name as me but was no relation. He was my best buddy in all Clinchco and the kids at school called him Pete, but I couldn’t tell you why. An alley ran between the back of our house and the back of Pete’s house, so whenever Pete headed out his door for school he ran through our house on his way down the street. Nobody in my family seemed to mind. Mama often spooned up a second helping of banana pudding on Pete’s plate if he stopped long enough at our kitchen table.

“Just stand back,” I said, real quiet, and loaded a bullet in my rifle. I fished around in my pocket and took out a silver dollar. Now, it took a quarter just to buy a box of .22 rifle shorts, so the sacrifice of a whole silver dollar meant I was making a real investment on glory. I flicked the coin high in the air, maybe eight, ten feet, grabbed my rifle hard with both hands, and fired.

Pete nodded. He was no slouch when it came to shooting, neither, but this was my experiment. I fished around in my pocket again, took out a smaller half dollar this time, flipped it high in the air, and pulled the trigger. Pete’s mouth plumb dropped out of his jaw. “Wild Bill Hickok ain’t got nothing on you,” he whispered.

Was the dime I was worried about. Try as I might, I never could hit a dime when I practiced before. None of the kids at school would care about a penny. But they’d ask about the dime. Shoot—I wasn’t even doing this to impress the kids, you know, I was doing it to challenge myself and become good at aiming. So maybe Pete would think the nickel was all that’s needed. Or maybe I had jumped ahead of time and called him to witness the experiment before I was truly ready. There wasn’t any man or boy I knew who could hit a dime with a rifle. I decided to call it quits with the nickel, so I said, “Well, I guess we’ll call it a day then.”

High school hit, and Pete and me stayed friends. Always on each other’s side, that’s the way we were. Math was my favorite subject in school, came real natural to me, and Pete was good at it, too. Pete and me competed to see who’d get the best grades in math. It was always only a point or two difference, and we never fussed either way. For one year our family moved eleven miles away to a town called Clintwood, then moved back to Clinchco. All our friends still felt real close despite our leaving and coming home again. Us kids did more than hunt and shoot for fun, you know. True, we was always outdoors growing up. But we had baseball, softball, football, and basketball, no television then, but a few good radio stations to tune in to. We listened to Amos and Andy, and had cookouts, picnics, and there was always swimming, fishing, things like that.

Our family was always close knit. All seven of us looked after each other. They called my older brother Barnum Junior then just Junior for a while, then just Barney later on. He was older than me by three years. Then I had another brother, James, younger by three years, we called him Jimmy. My pretty sister Gaynell was four years younger than me. Then Franklin came along, the baby of the family, and we called him Frankie. Don’t ever remember fighting with my sister—sure, I’d tease her sometimes, but I always kept a good lookout for her. Us brothers sometimes argued about who brought in the coal and kindling wood, but other than that we never fought or carried on like some families do. Never did see my dad drunk. He had maybe two drinks a night, vodka and Wild Turkey were his favorites. Mother wasn’t necessarily stricter than he was, it’s just that Daddy left her in charge of making us behave, because he was off at work. So she assumed the role of disciplinarian. If we needed it, Mama dealt it out.

We always wanted to please Daddy. Mama, too, but we were with her all the time so it was different. Once my little brother Frankie was late coming in. Supper was ready and he wasn’t home. Daddy said, “Just wait till that boy gets here. Just wait.” I don’t know if he was gonna spank him or what. Finally Frankie came in, he’d been down at the river fishing. Before Daddy could say anything, Frankie held up his mud bucket and said, “Look what I got.” Daddy’s tone changed real quick, “What’d you get, son?” Frankie’s bucket was fat with trout, and he told him where in the river he was, and Daddy said, “Well, get us some minnows, and we’ll go back next morning real early and get us some more.” That’s the kind of daddy he was. Our parents raised us with a lot of love and fun, and that’s what they passed along to us.

When we lived in Clintwood, it came Easter and we had a terrible snow, so much that we weren’t able to go on our usual picnic Easter egg hunt. It wasn’t much trouble to me, but I could tell my little sister was getting choked up. She was in fifth grade and it was important to her. So I told her we’d hunt the eggs in our living room this year. Sis was so impatient, as was the littlest, Frankie. I wanted to give them a real good hunt, so I hid those eggs all over the room, then called them in, daring them to find them all. They squealed and laughed and ran about, and when the hunt was over, three eggs couldn’t be found for nothing. About a day or two later, I let them in on the secret. One egg I taped under the bottom of the table. The second, I hid in the back of our radio. I took off the cover, took out the tubes, hid the egg, then replaced the tubes. Third egg I ate, then opened the window, put the shells outside, and waited for the snow to cover them up. That’s why Sis and Frankie needed to wait outside the room so long, for those shells to be covered in snow. That’s the type of family we were. We made our own fun.

I played a lot of basketball for the high school, and that’s where I got my nickname. They thought I was kinda shifty on my feet, you know—quick-like, so they named me Shifty and it stuck. All the kids on the team had nicknames. There was Slick and Red and Pete and Flirty. It got so you didn’t remember what a boy’s real name was, but that was part of the fun.

When we moved to Clintwood, I played basketball there, and that year the Clintwood team won the county championship. I was also elected best dressed boy in school, but I don’t know if that’s something you’d care about. It’s not that I had better clothes than anybody, I was just careful, clean, everything had to be pressed neat. I had been tubby as a kid. Shoot—I weighed ten pounds as a newborn baby. But by the time I got to high school I had a long, lean build. Girls seemed to think I was a fine-looking fella, and I liked that real fine. Girls, I mean. I liked a lot of girls. Went with several. Nothing serious. Don’t even remember a steady girlfriend in high school, but we always went to dances and movies and for walks holding hands under the trees.

None of the kids I knew wanted to leave Dickenson County. Didn’t think of things in other places we might want to see. Maybe a few of us did, but we had it real fine in our hometown, so we just figured, why go anywhere else? Wasn’t any money for us to travel, besides. Wasn’t many vehicles in those days, you know. Maybe we’d go see a movie in Clintwood and we’d put a quarter’s worth of gas in the car. Or we’d gather a carload and drive over to Norton, about thirty miles. They had a big swimming pool in Norton. It was a real treat to swim there. That’s as far away from home as any of us ever went.

Mostly, I just kept hunting. I’d go to school, and shine shoes on Saturdays, and help around the yard, and hang out with friends, and play basketball, and every other spare moment I had I was out in the woods, squinting down the end of a rifle barrel. People ask me if I grew up something of a mountain man, and I say more or less. When I got into the army, I thought everybody knew how to do the things I did growing up—you know, scout the land, shoot with a rifle. I never took food or water with me when I hunted. I just went out, usually all day. We did a lot of that in the Army, and I got hungry same as any man, but it might not have bothered me as much as it did the other fellas. Maybe because I had been out there and looked at the forest and the sky and learned the types of trees and which ones have fruit or nuts that you can eat. Never hurt me at all, in fact it came in handy later.

Time has a way of changing what you’ve always known. The further I got in high school, the more I knew I’d need to find a trade for my life. Times seemed to be changing for a lot of folks. The radio was on each night, and we weren’t much listening to Amos and Andy anymore. There was a war on in Europe. Crazy things were afoot. The chancellor of Germany seemed intent on gobbling up one country after another. President Roosevelt declared a draft in September 1940, the month I started eleventh grade, but the war in Europe was on the other side of the world, the draft only for twenty-one-year-olds at first, and that age still seemed a long way off. I was still dreaming of doing something beyond shining shoes, so I got a job picking slate for the company. You ever picked slate?

Wasn’t the hard work I hated. Was the dust. The coal car comes up out of the mine and dumps its load, see, and you pick out the junk rock from the coal by hand. This big black dust cloud rises up and there are times when you can’t see the other fella on the other side of the car. You’d have to wait till the air moved before you could see again. I worked Saturdays and was paid fifty-eight cents an hour. The first day I worked ten hours and made five dollars and eighty cents. At the end of the day the company made me go buy some hard-toe shoes and a hard hat. When I came out of the commissary with my new gear, I owed the company eight dollars. So I picked slate most of that year and the next, but I knew it wasn’t my future. I needed an occupation, even if I wanted to live in Clinchco the rest of my life, which I did. I needed to learn how to do something more than pick slate.