Slap Your Sides (12 page)

H
ello, listeners. This is Radio Dan, your Home Front Man, bringing you the war…and tonight bringing you some thoughts about what's happened here in Sweet Creek that's put us on the map, sad to say not in a glowing light.

And you all know, so I'm not going to pretend you don't—you all know that my Darie is a part of this story…a very important part.

I've never spent any time with this young man the tabloid journalists enjoy calling the Quaker Killer. His father and I have been colleagues and neighbors for some twenty years. And I know many of you have done your shopping in Shoemaker's on Pilgrim Lane, and come to know Efram and Winnie.

Many of you know they belong to Sweet Creek Friends. The fact that they are Quakers is no small part of this story. Many of you are aware, too, that their oldest boy, Bud, chose to be a conscientious objector. In 1942 Bud entered Civilian Public Service.

Another, son, Thomas, attempted to join the Army and was rejected because of a perforated eardrum.

Now we come to Jubal.

I'm told by Darie that Jubal was planning to follow
in Bud's footsteps. Jubal, Darie told me, is a bona fide pacifist, a Quaker with strong convictions, a young man of fifteen who had already made up his mind that he was
not
going to participate in a war, in a fight of any kind, in violence.

You know, we parents think our kids tell us most things. Sure, they keep some things to themselves. But if you had a daughter and she had a regular date with a fellow, to go riding up to Chester Park most Saturday afternoons, wouldn't she tell her dad, or her mom, or someone?

She did tell someone. Darie Daniel told two people, in fact: her twin brothers. And when Dean was killed, she kept right on describing to Daniel the happy times she spent on horseback with Jubal Shoemaker.

The reason she couldn't confide in her old man, yours truly, or her mother, was that we aren't very sympathetic with Bud Shoemaker's position on the war…and we wouldn't have liked Jubal's pacifism any better.

Why, the only one my wife and yours truly could think of who had a
worse
attitude about this war was a man named Abel Hart. Abel Hart, draft resister, escaped convict, mental case…Yes, he is from our area, too. Or he
was
. From Doylestown.

Here's the thing, listeners; here's the thing.

My Darie believed she had a date to go riding with young Shoemaker, the pacifist. She went over to the Harts' stable in Doylestown to meet him.

Now, he wasn't there. There'd been a misunder
standing. He was on his way there, but he wouldn't arrive for a few minutes.

Someone
was
there, however. He'd been there off and on for about a week. It is said that one of the horses, named after General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was upset over it. This horse, Ike, was pacing and bolting his feed because he knew someone was hiding there in the straw…hiding from the law, the war, himself…even though by all rights he did live there. It was his home there. He was Abel Hart…. Maybe he didn't know who he was anymore, but he knew enough to find his way home and hide.

My Darie didn't recognize him. Nobody would have. I don't think his own father would have. Abel's hair had turned white and was down past his shoulders. He was in old, torn clothes reeking of filth. His hands had long nails and were all curled into claws. The ironic thing is I doubt that he meant Darie any harm. It was just that when she saw him, she began to scream, and he was afraid she would give him away. He put his hand over her mouth and muttered that he had the eyes of God now.

Well…Oh, listeners, the world is filled with irony. It is filled with drama. Here is a young man, fifteen, a Quaker, and something else about him: He was besotted with my Daria. This shy young man, this well-meaning young man (forget his pacifist leanings) spent five dollars and change on perfume for my daughter at Christmas. Evening in Paris, it was called. She wasn't even seeing that much of him anymore, but he couldn't get her off of his mind.

That fatal Saturday he heard her cry from outside the Hart stables. He believed that she was in danger—she may very well have been. Here was a crazy person who was telling her he saw with God's eyes. Here was a crazy person saying that to my daughter, and putting his large hand over her mouth, this smelly lunatic! My Darie was terrified! My Darie, in the dark of the Hart stable, had never been so afraid.

UNTIL.

Until, listeners, the pacifist came through the door bearing a pitchfork. The Quaker, the peacemaker, the shy, young fifteen-year-old member of Sweet Creek Friends School found something out about himself.

He found out that he COULD kill.

He found out that he WOULD kill.

In the few minutes it took to sense that someone he loved could be threatened, years and years of pacifist propaganda went down the tubes.

No one was going to hurt his girl!

Whoever tried to hurt his girl, was—
pfffft
—slap your sides—
slain!

 

Food for thought, is it not listeners?

Tonight I've given you something to think about…and Jubal Shoemaker has given me something to think about…. I still don't want that boy anywhere near my Darie, but…I thank God for that boy. I pray to God that Jubal Shoemaker will not be punished too severely for being more of a man than he ever dreamed he was!

Good night, my faithful listeners.

And again tonight we're going to go out with my Darie singing her tribute to the home-front girls—you know their names as well as I do.

“D
aria?”

“Jubal?”

Penn Station, New York City, August 1945. One year and five months since I'd seen her.

“Where are you going?” she said, as though she was surprised to see me out of Sweet Creek. Everyone knew I got a suspended sentence, providing I didn't leave Sweet Creek for sixteen months.

It was my first time away from home since March 1944.

I had to do public service too, and another provision of my sentence was that I was to refrain from contact of any kind with Daria.

“Oh, Jubal! What a good surprise to see you here!”

“Yeah. It is a good surprise.”

“What are you doing in the big city?”

“I'm visiting Bud.”

“Bud's here too?”

“He's still with CPS, and still on Welfare Island. He's coming in for lunch.”

“How long has it been since we've seen each other, Jubal?”

“Search me,” I said. A century. A millennium. I tried
to look into her eyes, but she glanced at mine only a second.

“I'm sorry about your father,” she said.

“His heart was real bad.”

My dad had died four months earlier, the day after President Roosevelt did. He fell over in our kitchen, raging against Truman—against the idea of someone like himself, “a haberdasher,” running the country in the middle of a war.

I'd find myself saying his heart was bad whenever anyone gave me condolences. I think I was pretending that it was
just
his heart, and not any aggravation I'd caused him.

“Thanks for your sympathy card, Daria.” She'd picked out that tacky card that said someone wasn't dead, someone was just away. But she'd written underneath the verse,

Those seven words stayed with me. I'd tell myself she didn't
have
to write that.

“Tell Bud hello,” she said.

“I will. Is Daniel home yet?”

“That's why I'm on my way to Sweet Creek. Dan's finally on leave.”

She put her suitcase down a moment and took off the yellow sailor hat she was wearing. She'd let her brown hair grow past her shoulders.

“How do you like boarding school?” I deliberately
didn't say Farleigh Hall because I didn't want to give her the impression I was keeping track of her.

“Fine, and I'm back at Camp Rainbow this summer.”

“Can you ride there? Do they have horses?”

“I can, and I do…but it's not the same.”

“Nothing is,” I said.

“No, nothing is, really. “

I wasn't walking Mahatma by her house and trying to see in her windows anymore, times I knew she was probably home on vacation. I wasn't even asking about her, but I'd listen around and I'd hear. I'd known she was at the camp for kids with polio for the third summer. I knew Farleigh Hall was near Princeton, New Jersey.

I wrote down where she was on the back of my calendar.

My calendar had a record of my public service, stuff I had to do instead of serving time. Pick up trash at Chester Park weekend mornings, and some nights I sat at court to check in drunks, wife beaters, and teenage roughnecks. Every day after school I cleaned the latrines at City Hall.

I never went to the Harts' again.

Mr. Hart called personally to tell me he knew his son's death was an accident. He bore no grudge, he told me, and I was welcome, either to work or visit. But I couldn't go there, not even to see Tyke. Luke wasn't over there anymore either. He'd left for a job in Cumberland County.

 

Daria had on a yellow cotton dress, and those high heels called spectators. It was the pumps that made her seem taller than I was. I remembered when I used to worry that I was short.

“I'm glad I left Sweet Creek,” she said.

“I didn't know you were that unhappy there.”

“I wasn't, up until the trouble,” she said. “Now I can't stand it! I hated what the newspaper wrote about us, as though we were an item.”

I tried to remember if I had ever believed the same thing, or if she had
always
let it be known that she didn't feel that way about me.

“Your father made it clear it was all one-sided,” I said. “He didn't waste any time shipping you off to school, either.”

“I think he really
believed
he was getting me out of harm's way, you know what I mean?”

“I guess.”

“I don't mean you in particular.”

“I know.”

“I've never in my life been so scared as I was that day Abel jumped out at me!…Thank God for you, Jubal! I know I never thanked you.”

“That's okay.”

She gave a defeated little laugh and put her hat back on.

“How's Tommy?” she asked.

“He's fine. He and Rose and the baby have been
living with us since Dad died.”

“I heard. They were real brave to just stay in Sweet Creek and not give a hoot what anyone said!”

“They gave a hoot. Particularly Rose. But I don't think they had much choice, Daria.”

She was frowning and still avoiding my eyes. I think she felt obligated to say something, to somehow make more of this chance meeting.

I said, “I'm late, so—”

She looked relieved. “So…so long, Jubal.” She touched the sleeve of my pinstripe seersucker suit with her long fingers.

“So long,” I said.

I didn't wait and watch her walk away.

I asked for directions to Grand Central Terminal, and I rode the subway with my heart pounding.

Someday, I believed, she wouldn't have that effect on me. But our lives would always be linked, no matter what became of me.

If it had been Luke Casper menacing Daria, and if it had been Luke Casper I had killed, I would surely have stood trial. I probably would have served time for manslaughter.

But it was a relief to almost everyone that Abel had been destroyed, whether it was willful on my part or the accident it had been.

I'd pleaded guilty before a judge who was later one of my father's pallbearers. A fellow Rotarian. He was a friend of Radio Dan's. I always believed he'd been
instructed by Daria's father to include staying away from her as part of my punishment.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself, Jubal Shoemaker?” he'd asked.

“All my life I'll wish I could take back the day I killed Abel Hart,” I said.

“What about if he really
had
been about to do harm to Miss Daniel?”

“Could I have stopped him without killing him? I think so, but I didn't try.”

Before I'd crushed Abel's spine with the pitchfork, I'd heard the bone crack, heard him yelp like some miserable, abused street dog. He was too weak and defeated to make a louder noise.

 

“Don't keep talking about it, Jubal,” Bud said. I'd met him across the street from Grand Central Terminal, in a large restaurant called Longchamps. “Don't beat yourself up about it.”

“I hardly ever talk about it,” I said. “It's just that we've never really discussed it.”

“It's not your fault.”

“You know that I never meant to kill him! I couldn't even see him in the dark! I thought it was Luke!”

“I know, Jube.”

“I grabbed that pitchfork to threaten Luke, to make him stop whatever he was doing to Daria! I thought Luke was drunk. I didn't intend to kill
anyone.
”

“It's hard for you because you never liked Abel.”

“And people are talking about that, too. I know they are.”

There were even kids at SCFS who thought that I wouldn't have been able to kill just anyone…that I must have hated Abel…and there were those who could remember I'd called him names and made fun of him. No one had ever heard me speak against Luke. No one knew anything about Daria and me or that I resented the way Luke behaved around her.

Bud said, “People in Sweet Creek aren't talking about you. You did them a favor! Abel's out of sight, out of mind. If they had their way, we'd
all
be out of sight permanently. Not just for the duration.”

He took his hearing aid out of his ear and tapped it against the table. Hope had told Mom that he was always imagining there was something wrong with the equipment, but the truth was, he was getting deafer.

Bud still didn't care what he wore. He looked like he'd grabbed what he had on from that bin down at the soup kitchen. His jacket sleeves ended way above his wrists, and the collar of his sport shirt was frayed. Plus he looked like something out of a concentration camp. The experiment was over, but he was having trouble gaining the weight back, because he'd become a vegetarian.

Lizzie'd started calling him Saint Bud. She'd make the sign of the cross when she'd say his name.

 

At Longchamps I ate chicken chow mein while he had a Welsh rarebit. He showed me some pictures of
Hope. She'd written me to say Abel never would have survived, anyway. His mind was gone.

It should have helped to be told that, but it didn't stop me from hearing the crack of that bone, and the high little cry from Abel's throat. It didn't stop me from knowing that with one thrust I'd killed someone as defenseless as a frightened animal.

 

I
had photographs, too, at lunch that day.

I passed them to Bud one by one.

“It's hard to look at family photos and not see Dad,” he said.

Dad scowling, I thought to myself, but I didn't say it. Between the two of us we had probably hastened Dad's death. But Bud had never seen him near the end, when he'd forgotten how to smile, when he sulked down in the cellar—the hell with Mom, the hell with us all.

“This is all we need, Jubal!” Dad had declared when the police brought me home from the Harts' that day.

What none of our family had foreseen was the feeling of relief in the community. It was easier to understand someone who'd kill than it was to understand someone who wouldn't. The Shoemakers were just like everyone else after all. Bud was a maverick, an embarrassment, and because of Bud our business still suffered. But my mother got letters from people in Sweet Creek who wanted her to know they understood what she was going through because of what I'd done. And my father took a perverse glee in the idea of my
devout mother suffering this homicide in the family. There was a new spring to his step, and he was snide and smug.

 

Bud passed the photos back to me.

“Poor Tommy,” he said. “He still tries to dress like Fast Tom, doesn't he? Lookit that white jacket with the navy pants!”

“Rose spoils him,” I said. “She buys him clothes. She's on the night shift at Wride's now, and she makes more than Tommy does. But he comes home to have lunch with her and Garten everyday.”

“Garten Shoemaker. That's quite a moniker for a little guy.”

“It's her maiden name.”

“I know…. What's she like?”

“Lizzie says there's just one word for Rose. Pleasant.”

“Lizzie likes to nail everyone, doesn't she?” Bud took a Camel from his pack and lit it. He said, “How's the store doing?”

“Thanks to Radio Dan, we're almost back to normal. He plugs Winnie's Weekly Winner. It was his idea for Mom to feature something every week.”

“What about his daughter?”

I wasn't going to tell him we'd just run into each other at Penn Station. I didn't want Bud to pick at it. I doubted I'd tell anyone.

I said, “She's around.”

“Are you still hung up on her?”

“I got over that.”

“Because if you're going to witness, it helps to have a girl who's supportive.”

“Yeah…but don't you think the war's winding down?”

“Like it was winding down at the end of
All Quiet on the Western Front
?” Bud gave me one of his sardonic smiles. “How many people will be killed, do you think, while the war's winding down?”

 

The same day I arrived back in Sweet Creek, an American B-29 bomber,
Enola Gay
, dropped an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima, a port on Japan's eastern coast. The bomb was called Little Boy, and the haberdasher running the country in the middle of a war pronounced it “the greatest thing in history!”

Three days later a second bomb, named Fat Man, was dropped on one of Japan's innermost cities, Nagasaki.

Bud was right to wonder how many people would be killed before the war wound down. Some 210,000 Japanese were known to be dead just because of Little Boy and Fat Man.

 

That fall our teachers at SCFS talked of a whole new concept of war in which fighting men would never be needed in such numbers again…in which there would be no draft. What would become of protests against war, when the means to wage it had been so profoundly changed? We had many debates. And when peace came,
we had plans. A majority of our seniors signed up with the American Friends Service Committee, to do relief work in Europe before going on to college. I was one of them.

 

Soon after the Japanese surrendered unconditionally aboard the USS
Missouri
, in Tokyo Bay, Radio Dan made an announcement.

 

Listeners, this is your old home-front pal Radio Dan. I'm moving on now. They say in the Bible there's a time to reap and a time to sow and so forth and so on, and I'm adding my thought that there's a time to move on.

I've been invited to have a little show up in the Finger Lakes, in a peaceful little hamlet called Auburn, New York.

My wife, and Darie, and my son, Daniel, went there with me for a look see, and we liked what we saw. I think Darie and Daniel like the idea of the illustrious Cornell University being right nearby…“Far above Cayuga's waters.”…Oh, yes.

Now our wonderful sponsors, the Wrides, are closing their plant. No more K-rations (do I hear a cheer from the troops at that news?), so no more onions. Breathe a sigh of relief. Or just breathe, period.