Slap Your Sides (5 page)

W
hen I got back to Pilgrim Lane, the police were just pulling away. There was a smear where the yellow stripe had been. My father smelled of turpentine.

“Where were you, Jubal? I was worried about you.”

“I lassoed the guy, but he got away.”

“We saw the rope…and the paint can. The police took the paint can for evidence.”

“What? Fingerprints or something?”

“Well, they'll likely ask at Hampton Hardware if anyone can remember someone buying that particular paint.”

“Okay.” Daria told me it was an old can from her family's cellar, so I felt relieved that probably nothing was going to be found out about who did it.

“But where
were
you, Jubal?” My father had on the heavy gray sweater Aunt Lizzie had given him for Christmas. He was looking down at me with a frown, the snow on his thick black hair.

“I got winded chasing him,” I told him. “I went into the diner to see if anyone had seen him around. I got a Coke.”

“What'd he look like? Was he a boy or a man?”

“I couldn't see his face. He had a stocking cap pulled down to his eyes, and he had a scarf around his neck. A
red scarf. He wasn't a big guy. I'm taller.”

I had never lied to my father before, and I was surprised that what I was telling him came from me easily and seemed like a game.

My father shook his head. “I wish I knew who was doing it.”

I would have liked to tell him that it was just Daria Daniel, no big deal, because once I knew it was her, I felt relieved. I didn't figure her as much of an enemy, and she was only a girl, too. But I wasn't sure how he'd take it: whether he'd tell Radio Dan and get Daria in trouble, or just walk around sadly the way he had last Sunday morning, as though someone had betrayed him. Neither thing was good.

On the way home he told me that he and Hope, Abel, and Tommy had left Wride Them Cowboy early.

“I should never have taken them there with me,” he said. “When your mother refused to go, I thought I ought to show up because I'm in Rotary with Dan. I'd just look in, I thought…. Someone spiked Abel's punch. There must have been a lot of alcohol in it, because he's been throwing up like a poisoned dog.”

“Just Abel's punch?”

“Word's around he's not registering for the draft, that's why.”

“Are you sure that's why?”

“I've heard talk of it at Rotary, too…. But I can't help feeling sorry for the boy. I never saw anyone vomit like that.”

“You know what, Dad? We ought to paint the store. Not the outside but inside. We ought to paint the walls white.”

“What made you think of that suddenly?”

“I don't know.”

“You're right. I don't like the pale yellow. There's a project for you and your pal Marty Allen in the new year.”

“When I can get to it. Tommy and I have our hands full at the Harts'.”

“And now you're losing Abel.”

“He was never any help, Dad.”

The Sweet Creek Savings Bank clock chimed, and Dad said, “This will be the first time we begin a new year without Bud.”

“Dad?”

“What, son?”

“Would you have done what Bud did?”

“I've thought a lot about that, as you can imagine…. I just don't know.”

“At Friends kids say this war is different. Someone I know asked me if there's a rabid dog in the neighborhood, shouldn't you help kill it so the neighborhood's safe?”

Dad said, “Jubal, you can't equate killing a mad dog with dropping tons of bombs on innocent civilians.”

“But even some guys at school are saying they aren't going to be COs.”

“It takes confidence and conviction to witness, Jubal. There aren't many like your brother.”

We rode along awhile before Dad said, “Guess who
bought a double-layer chocolate cake with a fudge frosting, and put it in our refrigerator.”

“Not Hope?” I thought he was heading in that direction because he had this little grin. Hope was known to be a tightwad.

“That's who,” he said. “She says she's got an announcement.”

“Uh-oh,” I said. “Is Bud going to marry her?”

“I hope not.”

“I hope not too.”

“She's all right,” Dad hurried to add.

It was snowing harder. In the houses we passed, we could see the Christmas-tree lights. Everything looked like the inside of one of those snow globes…. I was thinking, If Bud marries Hope, that drip Abel will be my brother-in-law.

Just as we pulled into our driveway, the town siren was sounding and church bells were ringing.

Abel Hart with his fire-red hair was sitting at our kitchen table, sipping hot cocoa, his face white as flour. I didn't say anything to him, and he didn't say anything to me. Tommy had one of those little horns to his lips that unrolled a snake of red tissue when you blew it.

Everybody was wishing everybody Happy New Year, and even Mahatma was smiling and wagging his tail, a big red bow around his neck.

Mom was torn between smiling and not, still a Quaker to her bones.

If her heart wasn't in featuring the first day of 1943,
it
was
in all of us being together as a family.

Finally, Hope brought out the cake.

“I've got an announcement,” Hope said.

We were all standing around in the kitchen for some reason, and suddenly it got quiet and all eyes were on Hope.

“Maybe you know the American Friends Service Committee sponsors an all-women CPS Unit. I've accepted a job at a CPS camp in Virginia as the dietitian.”

“Oh, Hope!” my mother exclaimed, and everyone began to clap.

I was really clapping, and when I looked over at Dad, he was too, all smiles.

L
isteners, before we say good night, I want to read you something that will break your hearts. I found it when I opened my copy of
Life
magazine this morning. It happens to be an advertisement for the New Haven Railroad, but don't hold that against it.

What you see is this kid in the upper berth of a train, and here goes with the copy:

 

Tonight he knows he is leaving behind a lot of little things—and big ones.

The taste of hamburgers and pop…the feel of driving a roadster over a six-lane highway…a dog named Shucks, or Spot, or Barnacle Bill. The pretty girl who writes so often…that gray-haired man so proud and awkward at the station…the mother who knits the socks he'll wear soon.

Tonight he's thinking them over.

There's a lump in his throat…and maybe a tear fills his eye.

It doesn't matter, kid. Nobody will see. It's too dark.

 

Listeners, time out. I've got a lump in my own throat, and a tear in my eye too…. I think you can take a look at your own copy of
Life
and read it to the end.

Say a prayer for our boys wherever they may be. Pray that one day we can clap our hands again, that we
will have won the war and our boys will be on their way back home for keeps.

 

My daughter, Darie, the only child I have left at home, now that my twin sons are fighting for their Uncle Sam, will sing us out as usual.

T
hat February I got a letter from Natalia telling me she'd send me a book called
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
, with one “really good part” in it, if I would send her a picture of Tommy.

I didn't read that part aloud at dinner, but I read the P.S. that said Freud had died and my Aunt Lizzie was “devastated.”

“Oh, dear, I'll have to call her tonight,” Mom said.

“Devastated about a cat's death!” My father pushed his chair back from the table.

“Well don't we feel terrible about Quinn?” my mother said.

“What about Quinn?” Dad grumbled.

“Haven't you paid any attention to what Tommy and Jubal have been talking about? That horse just can't get over Bud's absence.”

“Oh, dear me,” my father said sarcastically.

This was the winter of their discontent, as Shakespeare might have put it, a time when they couldn't agree on anything. When Dad took my advice and helped me paint the store walls white, Mom said the house trim needed it more. When Bud got transferred to a volunteer job in a mental hospital, Mom wept, fearful for him, but
Dad said he'd be of more use there than off in the woods felling trees.

Dad had made a little den for himself downstairs in the basement, where he read the papers and now listened to the radio, too: Lowell Thomas, Gabriel Heatter, even Radio Dan
(Listeners, Ginny Rippon wants to share a letter from hubby, who's flying missions over Germany, and begins,
Darling, I think of you as we go through the darkness on a starry night, carrying our killer bombload to Kraut targets).
I'd hear Daria singing “Slap Your Sides.”

Dad also followed the war with an atlas by the armchair he'd moved there. On a map of North Africa he'd marked a spot with a pin and written “Kasserine Pass. 1st defeat of Americans at the hands of Germans!”

My parents were not sharing the same bedroom anymore either. Mom blamed it on Dad's snoring, but he had always snored, and all of us had always slept through it.

Then word came that one afternoon the doorbell rang at Judge Edward Whipple's, and old Mr. Chayka delivered one of those telegrams with stars on the envelope. Eddie Jr.'s plane had not come back from a mission over Germany.

A few days later my father came home with an armband and an air-raid warden's helmet. He refused to discuss his new role as a neighborhood volunteer with anyone in the family. The fact was, no one asked him about it.

It was a dreary February, with rotten weather to go
with news of more servicemen's lives lost, thousands of people dying or becoming crippled from polio, and everything rationed from shoes to butter to canned goods. Ever since Daria had marked the store windows, someone copied her three times, not bothering with words, just a large yellow Y.

On the one-thirty bus I took to Doylestown, to work at the Harts', there sat Daria one Saturday. I'd run into her in Sweet Creek three times since New Year's Eve, but she was always with one of her parents.

That day she was going to Mrs. Ochevsky's for her singing lesson. She greeted me with a big smile.

“My mother always drove me, but she says we can't use our gas rationing tickets for recreational things anymore,” she said.

“That's a little insulting, since you're pursuing a career as a professional singer.”

She gave me a surprised look. “I'm amazed you remembered that about me.”

Then she asked me what it was, exactly, that I did at the Harts'.

“You probably told me before, but—” She didn't finish her sentence.

“But you didn't listen.”

“Am I supposed to hang on your every word?”

I felt like saying, Why
not
? I hang on
yours
.

She was in that same plaid mackinaw that was too big for her, blue jeans, and boots. Her ears were covered with furry red earmuffs. Nobody would ever call her a
beauty, but there was something about her that stopped me cold. I'd be looking straight ahead all the while I was sneaking peeks of her out of the corner of my eye.

I told her what I did at the Harts'. “I take over for Tommy and Luke Casper, who've been there since early morning. I muck out the stalls, feed the horses, exercise them, whatever has to be done.”

“Oh, how I'd love to ride one!”

“Well, you can. Just come over after your lesson.”

“Are you kidding me, Jubal Shoemaker?”

My heart was pounding. “Show up and see,” I said.

 

Tommy was sketching Quinn through the barn window. “Look at him out there,” he said. “What a sad sack! First his owner has to board him, then Bud disappears. This morning Mr. Hart told me Quinn was
bereaved.
He said, ‘That makes two of us, Tom. Quinn and yours truly.' Then he read me parts of a letter from Abel. He's in Florida, some prison in Tallahassee, and he's already in trouble.”

“Surprise, surprise,” I said.

“You don't get him. He tries to do the right thing, but it always backfires on him,” Tommy said. “First he tried to eat with the Negro prisoners because he's against segregation, and they put him in isolation for that. Next he got put in for writing letters for the Negroes. He says more prisoners there are illiterate than literate, so he was helping everyone he could. It was okay for him to help whites, but not the Negroes.”

“It's a southern prison. What did he expect?” I said.

“That's not very sympathetic, Jube.” Tommy put the crayon in his pocket and closed his sketchbook.

“Well, he thinks he can change the world single-handed, and overnight, too. Bud always said that kind of crusader is more nuts than principled.”

“Bud admires Abel, didn't you know that?”

“Okay, but I'm not Bud.”

“You ought to figure out why Abel gets under your skin.”

“Because a lot of people think that's what a Quaker is.”

“So what?”

“Don't
you
lecture me, Tommy! You didn't stick it out at Friends! You don't have any idea what it's like to be a Quaker around here now!”

“I know what it's like, little bro. Just because I'm at SCHS doesn't mean I'm not thought of as a Quaker…. But no one thinks I'm like Abel, either. Everyone knows he's eccentric.”

“I don't wish him harm,” I said. I didn't.

 

Behind Tommy, in the paddock, Quinn was standing with his head down and his tail dropped. He looked thinner. So did Mr. Hart, who was riding the tractor around to push snow away from the pasture. He had red hair too, and that same really white complexion, but somehow he didn't look weird like Abel. Just ordinary, just plain, the way he wanted to be thought of: Quaker plain.

“This is for you to read and keep to yourself,” said
Tommy. He passed me a letter with Bud's writing on the envelope, and the same PERSONAL printed on both sides in big letters and underlined.

“How's he doing?”

“You'll see,” Tommy said. “Quinn could use some exercise, but he doesn't seem to want anyone on him today. Luke Casper tried. So did I.”

I wasn't keen about riding Quinn when he was depressed. Sometimes his mood bordered on anger. I'd seen him throw both Luke and Mr. Hart. Deliberately. I'd probably walk him around by his lunge rein for a while.

Tommy had already mucked out, so I went in to see Baby Boy and Heavenly. They'd been exercised by Tommy and they were in good shape.

I took time out to read Bud's letter.

He was part of a CPS unit that had been transferred to Shenandoah State Asylum for the Insane, near Staunton, Virginia.

NO SKUNKS ALLOWED!

SO YOU CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS

STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM

THIS THEATER!

I had just finished the letter when I heard Quinn whinny out in the paddock.

I came out of the barn to see Daria talking to him, all the while stroking his neck and giving him cubes of sugar.

I went down there, and as I came toward her, she said,
“Just talk to me in a natural voice now, Jubal, because this horse is stressed.”

“How did you know that?”

“Both Luke and Danny Jr. taught me a lot about horses. While I was warming up with scales, I was watching this one from Mrs. Ochevsky's window. He looks so unhappy.”

“He is.”

“He's beautiful,” she said. She was patting him firmly on the neck and shoulders. She knew enough not to pat his nose. Most horses didn't like it.

“He's Bud's favorite,” I told her. “Bud says he's extra intelligent.”

“And sensitive,” Daria said. “Well, at least Bud's right about something. What's his name?”

“Quinn.”

“I got sugar from Mrs. Ochevsky. Do you think I could ride him?”

“If he'll let you.”

“Just keep talking to me. Just say nice things to me.”

“Did you notice we painted the walls of the store white?” I said.

“Why would I notice that?”

“Because you suggested it. Don't you remember? You told me New Year's Eve the yellow walls looked like puke.”

“I'd never say that word,” she said. “I hate crass words.”

I couldn't believe the way Quinn was taking to her,
putting his nose right down in her coat collar, his tail lifting.

After a while we walked him back to the tack room in the barn.

I had an idea Quinn was going to let her ride him.

When we came back out with him saddled, Daria got on him easily. Quinn's ears didn't move, a good sign. He shook his head the way some horses do when spring comes, to shake out the winter kinks.

Quinn was a goner from the time she sat on him. He pranced, snorted, danced, and I swear he grinned, too.

I went across to the fence and opened it for them.