Reluctant Warriors (45 page)

“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.”

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.”