Slap Your Sides (3 page)
Authors: M. E. Kerr
W
e headed away from the meetinghouse in silence. There was a strong odor of onions in the air, coming from Wride Foods. Before the war they made mayonnaise and potato salad, but the government stepped in and changed their entire operation. Now they dehydrated onions for K rations.
They were Radio Dan's sponsor.
Tommy had listened to the program for a few days, to see if Bud would be mentioned during one of Radio Dan's meandering musings. Dan would say whatever popped into his head, but according to Tommy the power of Rotary prevailed. Radio Dan wasn't going to go after the son of a fellow Rotarian.
My father always made a stop at his store on the way back from meeting. He would get out and check that the doors were locked. Because he had locked them himself on Saturday night, he never found them unlocked. That did not stop him.
“Please hurry, Efram,” Lizzie said. “I have to go to the little girls' room.”
“You can use the facilities at the store.” Those were the first words he'd spoken to Lizzie since we'd all come out of meeting.
“Never mind, I'll wait.”
“Suit yourself, Lizzie,” he said from the driver's seat, and then in an aside he said quietly, “You always do.”
“No, I do not always suit myself, Efram Shoemaker! I come here every single year to spend the holidays with my sister, since she won't leave
you
alone at Christmas, and
you
can't leave that department store of yours!”
“So that was what
that
was all about, back at the meetinghouse!” asked my father. “Getting even?”
“Maybe if you ever listened to the news, you'd know what it was all about!”
“I read the newspapers. That's enough.”
My mother edged into the conversation. “It's just too bad that what you had to say came on top of what Hope had to say.”
“What Hope said was half the reason I had to get up!” Lizzie said.
“This isn't a war about the Jews!” my father said. “It's a war about German expansionism!”
“Those are just words, Efram! The Jews are being killed!”
“They're not the only ones.”
Mom said, “Can we
please
not talk about the war?”
“I'm so hungry I could eat a bear!” Natalia complained.
My mother made the suggestion to my father that we drive straight home.
“We're two seconds away,” he said.
“You
know
the doors are locked, Ef.”
“It might be this very morning they're not, Winnie.”
He was already pulling into a parking space in front of the store.
I was the first to speak. “Someone soaped the windows.”
My father had the Buick's door open, but he just sat there looking at what was written in soap.
“Oh, Efram,” said my mother softly.
“What does it say?” Natalia asked.
Everyone was still a moment while they read:
YOUR SON IS A SLACKER
T
he window soaping had punched the breath out of Dad. He'd said it was “disheartening,” and all that Sunday I could see his eyes close to tears. He knew people in Sweet Creek disapproved of Bud's choosing to be a CO, but I don't think he ever expected anyone to slander Bud right there on our store windows, some unknown someone, like a thief in the night.
Next day, just as Lizzie and Natalia were leaving, my father cleared his throat the way someone has of doing it even though nothing's there. He was working himself up to saying, “Lizzie, I don't intend to write Bud about your little speech at the meeting, and I hope that
you
won't write Bud about the soaping of my store windows. I don't like to worry him.”
“I already wrote him about both things,” Tommy piped up. “Bud wants to know what's going on here. He doesn't want to be spared.”
“You wrote him already?”
“I write him every dayâ¦. I mailed it this morning.”
“Then that's that,” said my father.
“I would
never
have written Bud about your windows,” Lizzie said. “Did I say anything about it when we talked with him on the phone?”
“You didn't have a chance,” Natalia said. She had a pair of Tommy's socks in her suitcase. I'd let her take them. That would have made Bud smile, anyone wanting Tommy's stuff for a souvenir, but I didn't dare write him about it. I wasn't sure Bud wouldn't tell Tommy. There was something mysterious going on suddenly between Tommy and Bud.
When Bud called that afternoon, we all took turns. He called three days
after
Christmas because most servicemen were calling home for the holidays, or trying to. He felt obliged to give them priority. He was keeping his call short for the same reason.
He said what he'd been saying in letters: that he liked the other guys, that it was beautiful where he was, that he was becoming an expert at wood chopping. Then he thanked Lizzie for the Schrafft's candy, and when it came my turn, he made slurping noises and said, “Here's a big sloppy kiss, little bro.” Bud and Tommy used to gang up on me and give me these icky dog kisses with their tongues.
The family had already received two letters from Bud, but there had also been a third, addressed to Tommy. On the front and back of the envelope PERSONAL was printed out in block letters and underlined.
No one had asked Tommy about it.
My folks must have felt it wasn't their business: It was something between brothers. But
I
felt left out. I was afraid if I opened my big mouth, Tommy would tell me to buzz off.
“Honey, I hope the cat's better when you get home,” said my mother, hugging Aunt Lizzie.
“Thanks, sis.”
Uncle Mike had called the night before to say he'd come home to find one of Freud's eyes closed and bloody.
Natalia said, “I wish I had all the money Freud has cost us at the vet. I'd be rich.”
“It's Shakespeare's fault. He pounces on poor Freud the moment Freud falls fast asleep,” said Lizzie.
We stood around in the doorway saying good-bye. They had stayed just three nights. Dad had come home early from the store for Bud's call, and to bid them farewell.
I had plans for when they left. I was going to find that letter Bud had sent to Tommy. Mom and Dad would take Mahatma for a walk before it got dark. He was heart-broken, hanging out under Bud's bed or sitting by the door, expecting him to come through it any minute.
Tommy was catching the bus to visit Lillie Light, probably hoping he could reach 40 on her graph. Before he left, he held his arms out and spun around, showing off his new topcoat and hat. They were Lizzie's Christmas presents from Natalia and her. She said maybe certain Quakers didn't believe in featuring December twenty-fifth over any other day, but she wasn't a Quaker anymore. She came laden down with gifts.
She knew that Tommy and I always wore Bud's hand-me-downs. Her gifts to me were both war stories: Hemingway's
For Whom the Bell Tolls
and
The
Moon Is Down
by John Steinbeck. I loved to read, the same way Tommy loved to draw. I didn't care much about clothes.
Tommy did. He took after Dad that way. Dad claimed that he represented E. F. Shoemaker Company and was obliged to look his best. But Dad spent more money on clothes than Mom did, and he worked out at the YMCA three nights a week. Watching him put the finishing touches on what he was wearing, in front of a mirror, never left any doubt that Dad was a little stuck on himself.
I think Tommy knew, too, that he was getting this great face. As much as we all looked alike, put some cheekbones here, and move the eyes there, and the differences were startling when it came to Tommy.
I knew it when I thought about it, and when my cousin wanted his socks for souvenirs, but living every day with him, I didn't pay that much attention.
“What do you think of me?” he said.
He had on this herringbone tweed coat, and a soft brown fedora with a small red feather in the hatband.
“You look sharp.”
“Do I?” He was smiling and still twirling around, his eye catching himself in the mirror across the parlor.
“You got handsome,” I said.
“No, I didn't!” He blushed. “It's just the clothes Lizzie got me.”
He left the house with this big grin, and I waited until he was out of sight.
On Tommy's desk was one of the new paperback books Judge Edward Whipple had donated to every boy in the junior and senior classes at Sweet Creek High.
The Red Badge of Courage
by Stephen Crane.
I'd read it last summer. I'd never forget the first sentence. It sent chills down my spine.
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
But at Friends School we'd laughed about the fact that Crane had never been to war. Only somebody who'd never been shot at would think of a wound as a “red badge of courage.” Besides, he'd bragged that he'd written the book in just “ten nights.”
My family knew the Whipples very well. My father said one of the reasons the draft board hadn't given Bud that hard a time about his choice to be classified 4E was because the judge knew him and never doubted his sincerity.
Shortly after Judge Whipple presented all those books to SCHS, a Lancaster Mennonite named Gish, along with Lillie Light's father, arranged a showing of the movie
All Quiet on the Western Front.
School kids were bussed to see it. Lew Ayres, the movie star who played the lead, became a CO years after he made that picture. That was right after Pearl Harbor, before Sweet Creekers were really involved in the war. It was before Radio Dan had begun calling himself The Home Front
Man. Up until then he'd just been a disc jockey, and he'd called his program “Clap Your Hands.”
I found the letter I was looking for in Tommy's lower desk drawer.
Dear Tommy,
We went out to do some caroling before Christmas. There were six of us, five Catholics and Quaker Bud. Thanks to you, I knew the words to almost all the carols. Remember how you'd play them at Christmas and Mom would forget she didn't feature Christmas and hum them?
We'd decided to serenade the houses up on the ridge, about eight of them, mostly poor families with kids, we'd been told. We did it for the kids, really.
It was bitter cold and snowing a little. Porch lights went on, and we could see people looking out the windows. We were carrying small candles in paper cups.
At one house they blinked the lights when we were done as though they were saying thanks. And at another, a woman opened the door a crack and called out, “Merry Christmas!”
At the third house a man came out on the porch in boots and a leather jacket, and
he shouted while we were singing, “Where you boys from?” We just kept on singing, so he came down the porch steps, and we saw he was carrying a pistol.
“I
said
where you boys from?”
My buddy, Cal, said we'd better get out of there fast, so we called “Merry Christmas!” over our shoulders. But he was hollering that he knew where we were from and he'd like to kill us! Then he began firing the pistol.
We beat it, and thank God he didn't chase after us, but by the time we got down to the next house, there were a man and woman in the doorway telling us, “Go away! We don't want your kind on our property!” Same kind of thing at the next house, so guess who probably telephoned them we were coming. More vile names for us as we kept going, and one guy came out carrying a baseball bat, promising to bust open our skulls.
Tommy, I'm not telling you this for sympathy. It was our own fault for not knowing better. In the hills here, outside Saw Hill, we almost forgot how people feel, but we are learning.
I want you to know the truth so you will discourage Mom from coming out here to spend her birthday with me. I know that's
what she says she wants, but it's not a good idea. When I make my holiday call, none of this will be said, but you have to know that everyone here in Saw Hill knows, when strangers come, they're here to see us, and it isn't pleasant for them. For the same reason don't bother sending any packages. I'm telling Mom that we're forbidden to receive them, but the reason is that somehow by the time they get up here to us, most are empty or damaged. I got an empty Schrafft's candy box, probably from Lizzie and Mike. Don't tell Lizzie any of this. Don't even tell Jubal, because why make him worry? Now that I'm gone, you're the man of the family, Tommy, and the other thing is that I want you to know what to expect when it comes your time.
Nothing's hard about the day-to-day life, but it's boring and it's a lie to say we're doing work of national importance. They invent repairs we need to do on roads and trees to take down. They're just keeping us out of sight, and I suppose out of harm's way. Both Cal and I have put in for transfers someplace where we can at least help people. There are mental hospitals short of attendants, and there are some experimental medical programs needing volunteers.
Anything but this!
I worry a lot about Hope's brother, Abel. Hope says word is out that he's refusing to register for the draft, and that any day now he'll be arrested. Abel's always been a purist. He'll meet up with a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses in prison; there are more of them against registering than us. I've heard it's hard on all of them. I hate to think what the guards and even the other prisoners will do to a brilliant, sour character like him. But at least the horses will get a break with Abel gone.
You'll have some thinking to do, too, Tommy, in a short while, about what choice you'll make. That's why I'm going to keep you up-to-date on everything. Just you, brother. I don't want the family worried.
I pray for you and Jubal, Mom and Dad, Mahatma, and Quinn. Pray for me, too, and pray for peace.
Love,
Bud
P.S. Thanks for the sketches of Quinn. Do you ever think about becoming an artist?
