Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Read online

  The winds of winter also leaked through the cracks. On bad days, the linoleum on the kitchen floor rose and fell with the gusts. I remember a happy house, but not a cozy one. Even when the wood fire was raging in Mama’s cooking stove and the heating stove was going full blast, the kitchen could be warm above the knees but chilly at ankle level.

  Not long before we left the place to move to Mama’s farm, Sacred Heart was blessed by the arrival of a natural gas line and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal paid off with a Rural Electrification Administration power line. Now we had electric lighting and it was practical to move our war game indoors during winter nights. The new battleground became the kitchen. Here’s how it worked.

  Barney, as keeper of the arsenal, would hand out rubber guns to those who had not come armed. We would stand on opposite sides of the kitchen table, the light switch would be flicked off by the Starter, each participant would find a hiding place while silently counting to fifty (“one thousand one, one thousand two,” etc.). Then in the tense, silent darkness the battle would begin.

  You’d listen, breath held. You’d hear the sound of bumping. Should you snap off a shot? Was it a trick to cause you to give away your position? Finally there would be an uproar—shooting, falling chairs, yelling, and banging. The Starter would switch on the light, expended rubber-gun bands would be retrieved and the game would be resumed. (As I write this it occurs to me that Mama and Papa, trying to read a few feet away in the living/bedroom, were long-suffering parents.) Eight winters later when my slumbers in the Army Hospital weren’t being disturbed by walking past the wounded sergeant in the ditch or the storeroom gorilla my subconscious would put me on my stomach under the kitchen table in Sacred Heart, hidden by total darkness and the hanging edges of the tablecloth, the feel of the cold linoleum against my stomach, the total silence broken only by the muttering of wood burning in the kitchen stove. And over all that the dread awareness that the muzzle of Billy Delonie’s rubber gun was probably about an inch from my eyeball. That nightmare was just as unnerving as the others.

  3

  Boy to Man

  If I make it to heaven, I’ll ask my parents why they moved the family from our house in Sacred Heart two miles down the road to Mama’s forty acres. I think I know the answer.

  Papa must have become aware he was dying. Perhaps the store was failing—the victim of the Depression, of better roads on which customers drove into town to do their buying, and of Papa’s policy of granting credit to anyone with a hungry family or a hard luck story. Whatever the reason, we built a house on Mama’s place, and Papa added to the forty by buying a twenty across the section line and a worn-out eighty-acre farm a half mile down the road. He paid $1,100 for the eighty, which says a lot about the condition of the farm and the price of land in the 1930s. It took a conversation with Barney, about thirty years later, before I came to really understand why he bought it.

  I had guessed Papa thought we could grow enough cattle and fodder on it to actually make a living. Barney thought it went deeper than that.

  Papa knew he would soon die. Margaret Mary, the smartest of us, was on the road to security and independence as a nurse. Restoring that ruined and eroded farm would give Barney and me something to be proud of. Make men of us.

  Well, said I, we didn’t get it done, did we? No, said Barney, we didn’t. But we might have if we’d stayed out of the Army. And aren’t you glad we tried?

  And try we had. We put in little check-dams on the slopes to stop erosion, seeded the pastures with clover and other legumes to provide some decent grazing, and kept our two horses busy all summer pulling a breaking plow through the one good segment of bottomland to kill the Johnson grass that engulfed it. Most ambitious of all, we began a project to straighten a creek that snaked through that bottom, wasting much of our potentially good alfalfa acres. Barney thought we could scoop out a direct route through the goosenecks for the stream and then dam the old route to force the creek to use the new one. We made good progress that first summer but the war came and got us before we finished it. Four years later the Axis had lost its war but the creek had won this one.

  My most vivid memories of those last months before Papa died were of the dismal November. The rains we’d prayed for in the summer heat had come, making it the coldest, wettest autumn the old-timers could remember. For Barney and me it was fence-building season, digging post holes, stringing roll after roll of barbed wire, and keeping a little fire going for an occasional hand-warming session. It was an ideal situation for two brothers pulled a bit apart by adolescence to get reacquainted.

  For example. A bitter Monday afternoon. After Mass on Sunday I had seen a shiny new Nash roadster parked at the store in Sacred Heart and had been captivated by it. I’ll have one of those one day, I assured Barney. I would find a way to make a huge amount of money. Barney put on his older-brother hat and asked me why I wanted a huge amount of money. I said I’d buy a Nash. Maybe even a Packard. Barney was not impressed. If you have food to eat and a warm, dry home, there’s just one thing money is really useful for, Barney told me. You can use it to buy your life back. Then you don’t have to waste it doing things you don’t like to do just to make money. I didn’t understood this theory, so he explained it. Don’t look for a way to make money; find a way to make a living doing what you like to do anyway. Otherwise you’re just raising funds to buy yourself out of slavery.

  That sounded foolish at the time. In 1993 I went back to the house we’d left behind fifty years earlier and made a side trip to see how the fence had fared. It was still doing its duty and seeing it recalled Barney’s philosophy. Foolish or not, it turned out to be pretty much the rule we’d both followed.

  4

  The Second House

  Our second house had also survived well. It was built on a concrete foundation with two bedrooms upstairs and a living room, bedroom, kitchen, and (praise God!) bathroom with indoor plumbing downstairs. That indoor bathroom—a first for our family and a rarity in the south end of Pott County—was luxury indeed.

  This house was made possible because years earlier Papa and Uncle Frank had provided desperately needed money and years of “on credit” food to a starving-out farm family. The family had eventually given up and joined Steinbeck’s Joads in the Dust Bowl migration to California. The bank at Konawa had foreclosed on the abandoned farm but Papa had found himself holding “mineral rights” to the tract. Such rights are generally worthless (I know, having been stuck with some down through the years) but this site proved a rare exception. It eventually attracted the interest of an oil company. Papa was paid about five thousand dollars for a drilling lease. The wildcat well was the usual dry hole, but the lease money paid to build our house. The indoor bathroom was possible because a Rural Electrification Administration power line went down the section road past Mama’s forty, providing electricity for the house and the pump which put water into the bathroom and kitchen.

  We moved into it in 1938, the grim bottom of the Depression. The price of cotton was so low it was being left unpicked in the fields and the Zoeller gin was closing. The beautiful Chester White boar on which Barney had lavished untold months of loving care and tons of table scraps won a blue ribbon at the county fair but brought him a check for only $7.23 when he sold it. The only jobs in our end of the county were with the WPA (when the Works Progress Administration had a project going) or day labor “rough-necking” at an oil well rig when someone had money to gamble on drilling. The only work I could find when our own crops were laid by was with hay baling crews. At fifteen, I could drive a buck rake as well as anyone else, or feed the baler, or even push the bailing wire through the slots. The pay was $1.25 for a ten-hour day and bring your own lunch. That 12.5-cents-per-hour scale made the 35-cents-an-hour wage I’d be making as an Oklahoma A&M college freshman seem generous.

  I was no more aware of this economic crisis in American history than I was that Papa’s heart was wearing out and the only help Dr. Giesen could offer him was
an estimation of how many more months it would pump. Our menus, typical of the pre-refrigerator times, were seasonal but we ate well. There was a year-round supply of fresh eggs, fresh milk, fresh-churned butter (I’d guess that not 10 percent of today’s Americans have ever experienced the delight of any of those three in their truly fresh, pre-refrigeration state), plus poultry, salt pork, and cottontail rabbits. Summer brought the whole array of things Mama produced in her garden, and Papa planted just about every sort of fruit tree, vine, or bush that would grow at our latitude—including three species of berries, four types of grapes, and apples, pears, plums, and peaches. Except for poultry and game, hot weather limited us to cured meat. The ice truck rolled out from Konawa and those who subscribed were provided little signs to stick in the screen door declaring whether they wanted twenty-five- or fifty-pound blocks to put in their iceboxes. But even fifty pounds lasted only about three days. Thus, eating fresh pork and beef was limited to winter with the season stretched a bit by the custom of neighbors sharing meat when they butchered. While the story was far different in the cities, I doubt if many farm families went hungry during the Depression.

  The trouble wasn’t food. It was lack of money to pay property taxes and to buy things you couldn’t grow in Pott County—such as sugar, salt, flour, the other kitchen staples, barbed wire for fences, medicine, parts to keep the old auto running, etc. Gasoline that year sold at eight gallons for a dollar in Shawnee but like most folks on the fringe of the oil patch we didn’t buy all of our gasoline. We kept a fifty-five-gallon oil drum on a rack into which we collected “drip”—the condensation that collects in natural gas pipelines where they sag at creek crossings. Taking this gasoline is illegal now and probably was then. But the oil companies didn’t mind. If we didn’t steal it they had to hire someone to tour the lines and drain them. But, alas, even that had its downside. Drip gasoline was rich with sulfur and cars that burned it trailed behind them that awful rotten-egg aroma, sure evidence of what we were up to and a cause of some loss of social status.

  Whatever the parental motivation for leaving Sacred Heart the move was the big excitement of my boyhood. I quit being a village kid and became a farm boy. Moving two miles may not imply a dramatic change in life style but as village kids Barney and I did only “chores”—cleaning the chicken house, weeding Mama’s garden, milking Bossy, feeding the hogs, chopping cookstove kindling, pulling water out of the backyard well to meet the needs of the kitchen, wash day, and Saturday baths and helping Mama with her efforts to make the yard pretty, etc. Now we were farmers.

  Workwise, the really big improvement was for Margaret Mary, who had always carried the heavier load. Being big sister, the role of overseeing two younger brothers fell to her. So did the job of being assistant cook, clothes washer, ironer, house cleaner, bread baker, canner of food, etc. As Mama said: “A man may work from sun to sun, but woman’s work is never done.” In a house without electricity or indoor plumbing that work was hot, heavy, and endless. The change for Barney and me was mostly psychological. The chores remained but we were also doing dignified man’s work behind a team of horses.

  For me this gain in prestige was balanced by a loss. We were no longer in easy walking distance of the Sacred Heart church. Even though neither I, nor anyone else, ever considered me a pious kid, that graceful old place was important to me in ways I had to grow old before I began to understand. Now they may be beyond my powers to explain. But I’ll try.

  Our church was built at the summit of Church Hill, the highest in our part of Oklahoma. Therefore when I sat in the shade of its trees to think boyhood thoughts I could (by Pottawatomie County standards) see forever. To the east beyond the cemetery and over the Zoeller pear orchard, stretched the rolling expanse of the Mission Pasture. There, beyond the farthest hill, was the pond full of huge bullfrogs for those of us reckless enough to invade this forbidden territory and astute enough to bag them. To the west, over the roofs of the monastery buildings and St. Mary’s Academy, an endless clutter of wooded hills fell away, waiting to be explored. And in every direction stretched the great blue dry-weather sky of Dust Bowl drought, and the towering clouds that waited for winter before delivering rain.

  The hilltop was first to enjoy a breeze and the church interior was usually cool and dim. It breathed the perfume of Sunday’s incense, old wood, candle smoke, and a sense of God’s presence. Sometimes the church was locked because of rumors that the Ku Klux Klan was planning arson. But I had become our self-appointed librarian and that gave me not only access but a reason to be whiling away my idle time atop Church Hill.

  The library, of which I was both founder and sole patron, occupied a storeroom adjoining the sanctuary. Its books were the odds and ends left behind when the Benedictines moved their school to Shawnee to become St. Gregory’s College. Some were in Latin, German, or French and undecipherable for me. Some were devoted to the metaphysics of theology and beyond my understanding. But others—worn, torn, and hard-used castoffs though they were—were treasures to a kid who loved to read and had never been inside a real library.

  I had found them collecting dust in stacks of boxes one Sunday, nosing around after doing my turn as altar boy at Mass. I told the young pastor we had at the time I’d sort them out and make a list for him. I suspect this bookishness and my habit of hanging around the church may have caused Father Bernard to consider me a potential recruit for the Order of St. Benedict.

  Making the list took many a month since I needed to sample the contents before penciling in title, author, subject, and publication date into my Big Chief notebook. I started with the Lord North translation of Plutarch’s The Lives of Famous and Illustrious Men of Greece and Rome, a sort of gossipy account of the machinations and misdeeds of the movers and shakers of the Classic Age and pretty racy stuff for a sixth grader. Then followed Prescott’s Conquest of Peru and Conquest of Mexico, Darwin’s Evolution of the Species, Washington Irving’s Conquest of Granada, and so forth. I dipped into The Lives of the Saints now and then for a change of pace. I wasn’t seeking a pious escape here from the bloody battles of the conquests. I picked those who attained sainthood not by praying but by dying—their martyrdom inspiring vivid descriptions of tongue extractions, beheadings, boilings in oil, burnings at stake, flayings, and impalements.

  Such reading provided an endless source of questions for Father Bernard to answer and answer he did. Darwin’s theories, said he, didn’t conflict with our biblical Genesis stories because we understood that in these God taught in poetic metaphor. The biblical “days” of creation represented eons of time. Humanity separated us from the other primates when God touched the first of us with self-knowledge of Him and of life, death, good, and evil. The evolution theory was simply a briliant scientist’s attempt to help us understand the dazzling complexity of God’s creation—from the amazing strength of a grasshopper’s legs to the way our brains translated the signals delivered by our optic nerves. He made the Gospels equally simple. Christ tried to teach us that happiness lay in helping others, selfishness was the road to damnation. His bottom line always boiled down to God loves us. He gave us free will, permission to go to hell if we wanted, rules to follow if we preferred both a happy life and heaven, and a conscience to advise us along the way.

  About the time I finished my indexing Father Bernard was whisked away to a more important assignment, and my next source of books did not come with a philosophical spiritual adviser attached. It was the State Library of Oklahoma, which would respond to requests by mailing a catalog of volumes available. Patrons then noted books desired and sent stamps to cover the mailing costs. After about three nail-biting weeks a package would arrive, causing intense excitement among the Hillerman kids. On top of the books would always be a mimeographed form letter:

  “Dear Library Patrons: We are sorry to inform you that not all of the books you requested are available at this time. Therefore substitutes were selected that we trust will meet your needs.”

  We would have
requested something like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables for Margaret Mary, and stuff like Captain Blood, Death on Horseback, Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout, and Red Badge of Courage for Barney and me. The package would contain such volumes as History of the Masonic Order in Oklahoma, The Bobbsey Twins on Blueberry Island, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Tom Brown’s School Days, Post-Bellum Cotton Economy on the Mississippi Delta, and Pollyana and Her Puppy. They’d all be read before the time came to return them—even though our new life in our new location left less time for sitting around with a book.

  For the first year or thereabout, Papa would drive our old Dodge into Sacred Heart and put in his regular ten- or eleven-hour day at the store. Margaret Mary would ride with him to complete the year at St. Mary’s Academy and Barney and I would walk down to the intersection where the school bus stopped and ride into Konawa High School to be educated. On Saturdays and when school was out the marble version of our war games survived briefly under the trees in the backyard. Junior Johnson, Jr., the kid in the rented house across the section line, joined us, and his father, Junior Johnson, Sr., came over to see what his boy was doing and got interested. He accumulated his own bag of marbles and when unemployed would join the combat. But it didn’t last long. The real war was coming.

  5

  Considered Educable

  The autumn before I became a soldier, Mama called a fateful family meeting at the kitchen table and that discussion needs its historical context. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor the previous December 7. Papa, who had been keeping himself alive mostly on willpower, died on the front room sofa the following Christmas morning. Barney turned eighteen in January and was running the farm while he waited for his draft call. Margaret Mary was completing her nurses’ training in Oklahoma City. I graduated from Konawa High in May and turned seventeen a week later. When I did, Mama suggested that at least one of us boys should go to college.