Reluctant Warriors (46 page)

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 Citadel, 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.