The Most They Ever Had (7 page)

The nightmare of the beaches blended into the nightmare of the hedgerows, which were filled with German snipers. “It seemed like the hedges were endless, row after row.”

In a place called St. Lo, pinned down by the Germans, he hid in a hedgerow and watched eighteen hundred allied bombers level the enemy’s gun emplacements on a target called Hill 192. He found out later that his cousin, Bokey McClellan, was in the crew of one of those bombers as it droned overhead.

His gun crew killed Germans they never even saw, with 155 Howitzers and ninety-five-pound projectiles that could travel eleven or twelve miles. He fought through Corbeil-Essonne, Meaux, Soissons and Laon, to Maubeuge on the Belgian border. “We fired on crossroads, towns, rolling barrages in front of the troops…what they called ‘softening up the area.’ You’d fire all night long. That works on a soldier.” Along the way, he broke his foot and cracked bones in his legs when a seven-ton cannon sagged in the soft mud and a piece of it pinned him to the ground. If the ground had been firm, or frozen, it would have cut him in two. After a few weeks in a field hospital, he was back in combat.

The trek across Belgium, through Mons, Charleroi, and Namur, stalled in the Hurtgen Forest. He huddled there, cold and wet and miserable, and wished he were back home even as he knew he would rather die than show his face there in the middle of this war. The village was not a place that tolerated weakness, cowardice. It was not a place that accepted shirkers.

“I knew that if I was back home, all my buddies would be gone, and everyone would be saying, ‘Why ain’t he there?’ They’d wonder why that feller’s son didn’t have to go and mine did. They were proud to have a big star hanging in the window.”

Around him, the blasted, black trees, mostly just stumps, mocked the name of this place, the Hurtgen Forest, on the Belgian-German border. Here, the soldiers’ C-rations froze hard in the can, their feet went numb, and their eyes were red from lack of sleep and the strain of watching, always watching, for the German tanks that seemed carved from a single, impenetrable hunk of steel. The men called the forest, “the Meat Grinder,” where one in four who fought would die.

Here, he saw things he never dreamed of, even in a mill town, where the bloody bandages were the cost of doing business. “Our own artillery fired on us,” he said. “A piece of shrapnel cut a boy’s face off, and then embedded in another boy’s shoulder. Companies fought all night long and then found out they were fighting each other…when the wind shifted.” The German planes, coughing and sputtering on their synthetic fuel, groaned through lead skies. “Sounded like an ol’ washing machine motor,” Homer said.

Eisenhower had promised the troops a turkey dinner on Christmas Day of ’44, but Homer ate a can of corned beef hash. “Slid out froze, like a popsicle,” he said. “I went sixty-three days without a shave, or a bath.”

He slogged through the Battle of the Bulge, wishing for the skies to clear so that the Allied planes could give them air support, and hoping the Germans would run out of gas for their tanks, which had once seemed invincible. The snow drifts piled up twenty feet high.

But the clouds did part, and the Allied planes bombed, and the German tanks ground to a dead stop, their fuel tanks empty. His mother had prayed the tanks dry.

He has a faded map tucked into his photo albums and memorabilia of the war. It shows the route of The Fighting 1st, shows his odyssey from the beaches of Normandy all the way into Czechoslovakia, from December 1944 to May 1945, when the war ended. They either fought or chased the Germans the whole time. He had been a good soldier. He did what he was told.

He even earned a Bronze Star, and he will not talk much about that, either.

Somehow, the Army forgot to give it to him, so he just went on home in November 1945.

The mill, he hoped, was hiring.

___

He came home without telling anyone, and walked through the streets in his uniform.

There was no parade here, although people did wave.

When he got home, he asked his brothers and sisters not to tell his Momma he was home. “When she gets off,” he told them, “I’ll walk her home.”

But it has always been hard to keep a secret here.

Someone told her, as she hunched over her spinning frame, and she did the unthinkable.

“She walked off the line and come home,” Homer said.

The technology had changed a little. Instead of brushing each other off with brooms, the workers now used compressed air to blow the strings of cotton from their face and clothes. “The poor ol’ thing didn’t take time to blow off,” Homer said.

She came running up A Street, tendrils of cotton hanging from her like Spanish moss, weeping, hollering, praising God.

___

Homer reclaimed a place in the mill. But one day, not long after his homecoming, he just looked up from his work and knew he had to leave. After all he had seen, all he had been through, he knew he could not spend his life there in the noise and roar. He had seen too many men with pinned-up sleeves, seen too much blood. “I probably would have never left, would a spent my life there,” Homer said. But the war shook something loose in him, shook it so hard it broke tradition and inertia and dependence, all at once.

The war was the end of the village as he knew it, too. The parochial nature of the mill, for good and bad, was unraveling, and people were looking beyond the village, in a post-war economy, for work. They had mobility now, were buying junk cars for one hundred dollars or less to drive to other plants, other places. Some of them were even looking all the way to Detroit, where a man could get rich, it was said, on the assembly line. The mill would spin on, employing hundreds, but the village was changing under the tires of the automobiles. Some of the hill people just went home, and drove back into town from the pines, their rusted and ragged cars forming caravans along the country roads, their headlights—and as often as not, just one working headlight—cutting through the dark. The women and men would lean against the warm hoods and talk and smoke, mixing nicotine with the lint in their lungs, until the whistle sounded.

“This place kindly come apart,” Homer said. “And the people scattered. Me, I run a pool hall, seventeen years. I never did get good playing, but I sent a lot of boys home feelin’ bad who said they were.”

He married Reba Tillery, who worked in the mill office. Later, Homer went to work with the City of Jacksonville’s Gas, Water, and Sewer Maintenance Department, till his retirement in 1986.

In June of 2004, the Army’s paperwork finally caught up with him. Homer, along with another overlooked soldier named Morris Beal, was finally awarded his Bronze Star. A retired Army Colonel in a sport shirt pinned it on him at a City Council Meeting.

“On behalf of a grateful nation,” the Colonel said.

His father would be proud of him for winning a big medal, he is pretty sure.

“I know my Daddy would be proud,” he said, “that I didn’t spend my life inside a mill.”

He left the mill, but not the village, not the people. He cannot even imagine leaving it, where he knows all the ghosts by their nicknames. He lives there, still, in a refurbished company house the company has not owned in a long, long time.

He never lost sight of the mill’s smokestack again.

Even after they torn it down, he could see it plain.

chapter five

the guitar man

The Country Mountaineers, sharp in snap pearl buttons, hair swooped back with a handful of dime-store pomade, were playing Dwight Hall in Gadsden on a Saturday night, a sold-out triple-bill with Sonny Simms and Grandpappy Lee Bonds. The metal folding chairs were jammed wall to wall with lintheads and smoke necks, with doffers, spinners, and weavers from Profile, Marvel, and Blue Mountain, rubber workers from Goodyear, steel workers from U.S. Pipe. Their hands crashed together in three-quarter time, and floorboards trembled under steel-toed boots. They were second-generation mill and factory hands, mostly, people who grew up under smokestacks instead of pines. But tonight, the boys on stage were singing them the country they believed they could remember, singing them so close they could smell the woods on fire. There was James Couch, and Jack Andrews, and the rest of the boys. And on rhythm, picking a yellow Gibson like it was going out of style, was Charles Hardy, one of the best front-porch guitar-pickers these people ever heard. It was northeast Alabama in the 1950s, in a dry county, and the only place to get rockin’ was the convention hall.

Rollin in my sweet baby’s arms
Rollin’ in my sweet baby’s arms
Gonna lay around this shack
Till the mail train comes back
Then I’m rollin’ in my sweet baby’s arms

It was just wood and glue, strung with steel, but my God, he could make that thing talk. He was bad to drink then. “I needed a pint just to get goin’ good.” But his fingers knew where to go.

He played with a working man’s hands, a cotton miller’s hands, and that might be why it sounded so good, why it sounded true. A guitar was about bending steel, pure and simple. You mashed steel with flesh, hard, to make it sound sweet and clear, each string, each tone, distinct and free of the ones around it. Any damn fool could strum. He sang the same way, loud and clear, with a little squall in it, and you could hear the Johnson grass and the red dirt in every word. He sang the popular songs, radio songs, sang Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms,” and Hank’s “May You Never be Alone Like Me,” and the hopeless, soul-twisting “I Cain’t Help It…”

Today I passed you on the street
And my heart fell at your feet
I can’t help it if I’m still in love with you

It was all about loss, that music, but as he sang it and the Gibson grew warm in his hands, he was happy, complete.

Crazy arms that seek to hold somebody new
But my burnin’ heart keeps sayin’ you’re not mine
My troubled mind knows soon, to another you’ll be wed
And that is why I’m lonely all the time

“I could play a little bit,” said Charles, who is in his seventies now. “People said I was kinda…” and he stops, as if the idea is too hard to get out. “People said I was gifted.”

“That very night,” he said, dreaming back, “I had my chance at the big time. I had a shot at the Opry.”

In the auditorium that night was a man named Sammy Salvo, a recording artist and record producer with big connections in Nashville, and with the Grand Ole Opry. He had some hits, like “Julie Doesn’t Love Me Any More,” and he had glided into town on an honest-to-God tour bus. Shaking his head in admiration, he walked up to the boys after the show.

“I want y’all to play a show with me,” he said. “I’m taking ya’ll to Nashville. Y’all go get on the bus.”

James Couch, who played lead guitar, mandolin, and some steel guitar, told the Nashville man he had responsibilities at home.

“I got to go to work tomorrow,” he said, and walked off.

Charles just stood there, caught between a dream and a real life of hard work and low pay in the Jacksonville cotton mill.

“You boys ain’t got no business working,” Salvo said, and laughed.

He turned to Charles.

“Go get on the bus.”

Charles had a wife at home, Sarah, and two children, Frankie and Vanessa.

He pictured the phone call he would make, from a truck stop or hamburger joint near the Tennessee line.

“Baby,” he would have to tell her, “I’m on a bus to Nashville.”

The bus idled in the parking lot.

His feet wouldn’t move.

He would have done it anyway, would have risked everything, even Sarah’s wrath. But the truth is, he was just scared, scared of losing another job, a real-life job, and, more than anything, scared of having a dream flung to his lap with a few seconds to grab it or let it go.

“I loved that guitar,” Charles said, dreaming back a half-century, more. “That guitar was my life.”

His life, but not his living.

“I reckon I won’t,” he told the man. “I got to go to work tomorrow too.”

___

He learned it from his mother, a banjo picker. They would sit on the porch of their house near Asbury Church on the Roy Webb Road, her on banjo, him with an old guitar. The first song he ever sung was “Comin’ Round the Mountain,” and they would sit and play until his mother, Julie, had to go work her shift at the mill. “I was eleven years old,” he said. “She could play that thing, boy. ‘Going Down Cripple Creek,’ all them old songs.” As a boy he dreamed about the Opry, and as a young man it seemed like he might be on his way. In the late 1950s, he and James and Jack and the other boys even had their own radio show on WHMA in Anniston, an hour of live music sponsored by Jim Walter Homes.

He had never read a note of music in his life.

“I picked by ear,” he said.

He could have made a good living picking in beer joints, but in a dry county there was no place to play except dances in skating rinks and high school gyms and the occasional big show at the auditoriums. He fed his family on the day shift at a succession of mills, and he was working at the Jacksonville mill, at Profile, the night he turned Nashville down.

“He always said he did it for me,” Sarah said. “I don’t think that’s true. He went, when he wanted to go. He went out to California once and stayed gone a week. Said he went to help some guy move.”

Either way, the regret sunk in like snakebite.

The Opry never came so close again.

He worked more than a decade more in the mills in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, and worked the Jacksonville mill till the bosses told him not to come back. The bosses had people waiting at the gate, begging for work.

“I was hittin’ that bottle pretty hard, then,” he said.

For eight years, he worked in mills in Blue Mountain and in Anniston, and picked and sang on the weekends with the band. In the mid-1960s, he got drunk and got thrown in jail. He pawned the Gibson to get himself out. The pawnbroker told everyone it was his guitar and asked more for it than it was worth.

“I didn’t get to go to the shows with him, then, because I had the kids, and no baby sitter,” said Sarah, who had four more children with Charles, praying he would change. “And every place he played there’d be some guy with a bottle, and he’d go with him.”

Finally, after drifting from job to job, bleary eyed and befuddled from the night before, he wound up at Marvel, in nearby Piedmont. Marvel (pronounced Mar-velle) was a long-running textile mill that made comforters and bedspreads, mostly from polyester. Its machines, in the late 1960s, were notorious. Charles Hardy saw one man lose an arm, but, like the Jacksonville mill, it was a means of survival. “Jobs was hard to come by, and I was glad I had one, after everything,” Charles said. “I loved that whiskey better’n a hog loves slop.”

He was borrowing a guitar now, when he played. In March of ’70, he and the boys played a party, and he drank a lot of white whiskey. He shuffled into work the next day, bleary eyed. “It guess it was still in me,” he said.

He had sung one of his favorites the night before, and, like the liquor, it was still in his head and on his tongue.

Oh please, release me, let me go
Cause I don’t love you any more
To live together would be a sin
Release me, and let me live again

He worked a machine called the Garnett. It was used to process giant sheets of polyester, to tear and flatten them into a web so it could be used as a filling in comforters. It was taller than a man, with massive rollers, “with teeth on it like a hand saw.” He used a long stick, like a broom handle, to work its controls.

“Nobody got too close to that thing,” he said. “But it had broke down on the second shift, and the boy who worked before me on second had used a piece of baling wire to tie one of the belts in place. I caught myself on a piece of that wire, and it threw my hand into them rollers.”

It started eating him alive.

An inch at a time, it pulled him into the teeth of the machine. He was alone in the big room—there were always supposed to be two men there but the other one had gone to talk to the bosses—and the rollers, with their saw teeth, pulped his arm but would not let him go. He fought it, beat it, but it just kept grinding. The blood ran into the gears, onto the floor.

“It took it three minutes to take my arm,” he said.

He finally jammed it with a broomstick.

He almost bled to death, anyway, hanging there, before someone noticed.

“It was my pickin’ hand,” he said, but if it had been his chording hand, it wouldn’t have made any difference.

“I stayed drunk two years.”

___

People would see him in town after that, working off a fine, cutting weeds one-handed with a slingblade.

“There was magic in that arm,” Sarah said. “He gave up on living for a good long time. It was God’s way, I believe. It was His way, to make him see where he was going.”

But Charles was not speaking with God then.

He worked about five more years at Marvel.

“Then I’d come home and cry all night,” he said,

He would wonder if it was all destiny, if he was cursed for turning his back that night on his dream. He screamed at Sarah about that, and blamed her.

He hated his life so much he even refused to sing, as if the same machine that took his arm had torn out his tongue.

People would ask him to sing, kin and friends, but he sat silent.

The words tasted like gravel.

Sarah went to work at Marvel, to help make their living.

___

He does not remember when it broke in him, that hopelessness, or even why. He just remembers sitting by himself in the house, years and years after he lost his arm, and these words coming out.

Her lips are warm
While yours are cold
Release me, darling
Let me go

“I sat there and cried like a baby,” he said.

There are no pat and perfect stories in the mills. He did not live a perfect life, and, from time to time, slipped back inside the bottle. But he loved the music again. He saw his boy Frankie became a professional musician with his Daddy’s voice and his Daddy’s skill. All his children would pick or sing, and their voices ring through the Fourth of July concerts and small music halls here in the foothills. “I prayed that one of them would get my arm,” he said. “I didn’t know all of them would.” He sang with them, and, sometimes, when he saw a man with a guitar, he would chord as the picker played.

His heart started getting bad in ’87, so he quit the whiskey. He has survived prostate cancer, and surgery on his lungs. He developed circulation problems in his legs, and the doctors told him to walk, so he does, but not enough. He quit smoking, started back, and quit again. “Been quit eight weeks this time,” said Sarah, who stood beside him. He got religion along the way.

He has noticed since quitting cigarettes again that his voice has improved.

He will sing for you, if you ask him. He laughs at the end of every song.

He is asked often if he regrets losing the Gibson.

“It ain’t lost,” he said. “This boy named Red Wilson went and got it—he married my cousin. He said, ‘Charles Hardy played that thing. I’m gonna keep it.’ Keeps it under his bed.”

___

Carlos Slaght, his kin, hosts a concert every year or so in his carport. The people sit in lawn chairs and eat good chicken and potato salad, until the music plays.

Steel guitar wails through the pines. A young man, one of the Hardy boys, does a mean buck dance. People take turns at the microphone, singing songs that have not played on the radio in generations. “Wildwood Flower” makes one man cry, because his grandmother used to sing it when he was a boy.

Charles Hardy sits in the shade, close to the pickers, so close he can reach out and feel the strings. His children and grandchildren finally push him to the microphone, and he stands there a moment as the boys tune up, his ruined, truncated arm swinging at his side.

Then he begins to sing, and you can hear the hurt in it. It sounds nothing like new country, like that poufy, sissy, over-produced mess on the radio.

It is as different as a garter snake is from a water moccasin.

It is beautiful.