Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Read online

  Along with obtaining custody of the car keys, I had more or less, at least in my own mind, became farm manager—for which I had no more competence than I had for trigonometry. Mama must have been aware of that and that I was dying to follow my big brother into uniform. We talked about it that evening at a supper dominated by Barney’s vacant chair and came to a decision. If I wanted to go, I could go. We would shut down the farm, sell off the livestock, and close the house. She would move to Oklahoma City. She would find a job. What then? I can’t remember that the question ever occurred to me. My only justification for that sort of selfishness is that teenagers tend to think of their mother as Superwoman.

  I don’t remember her attending the auction we held out at the barn of our farming equipment. The Depression and the drought had made such auctions rural America’s Ceremony of Failure. She must have known she would never return to her home here. Having seen what war does to mothers’ sons in her nursing of World War I wounded, she could have had no illusions about that either. I suspect the auction of our wagon, worn plows, cultivators, hay rakes, and harness was a scene she was happy to miss. My only recollection is of Blackie and Dan, our mismatched and trouble-prone plow horses, being bought by my cousin, Joe Grove. I knew even then that Joe didn’t need them and bid as an act of kindness. Many years later I asked him if he’d ever worked them. No, he said, he wanted to keep them for Barney and me.

  6

  Mama

  Before we get to the real war, you must get acquainted with Mama, the hero of this book. Without her understanding I would never have had a chance to wear the combat infantry badge, which we former grunts consider America’s highest military decoration, nor would I have become a writer. Mama’s own life had taught her that youth must have its adventures, whatever the risk. She passed that wisdom along, and also somehow taught me that daydreaming has its values. Her most important lesson was not to be afraid of anything—a variation on Father Bernard’s theme. Since God loves us, there is no rational justification for fear. If we do our part by using the good sense He gave us, He’s not going to let anything happen that isn’t somehow or other for our own good. Slam a door on your hand? While she was dealing with the injury, she would be telling us, first, to offer the pain as a penance for our shortcomings and, second, to learn something from the accident so we didn’t repeat it. If time allowed, such little disasters would lead her into a teaching story.

  Mama could create a tale of magic for her kids while bandaging a skinned knee, canning beets, or turning the hand-cranked clothes wringer beside the washtub. She was our singer of songs, reader of fairy tales, maintainer of the conviction that we children (despite drought, Depression, and the poverty that engulfed Pottawatomie County) had nothing to worry about except maintaining our purity, being kind to others, saving our souls, and making good grades. With Papa’s help, she persuaded us that we were something special. We weren’t just white trash. Great things awaited us. Much was expected of us. Bumps, bruises, and winter colds were not be complained about; whining and self-pity were not allowed.

  “Offer it up,” Mama would say, hugging us while she said it. When life seemed awful, cruel, and unfair, Mama would remind us that it was just a brief trial we had to endure, a race we had to run, a test we must pass as best we could. We were born, we’d live a little while, and we’d die. Then would come joy, the great reward, the Great Adventure, eternal life. So, children, never, never be afraid. Not of spiders (avoid the black widow, and she avoids you), not of lightning (avoid standing under trees during storms), not of storm clouds (see the beauty in them, the majesty; but if you see tornado funnels, we’ll have a little picnic in the root cellar). Not of drowning (God loves you but He expects you to use common sense). Not of snakes (they were our allies in humanity’s war against rats and mice).

  Papa’s instructions were more specific. Our kind of people never lie, never steal, never cheat. And maybe most important of all, Hillermans never judge others. We’re all God’s children and we’d leave the judging to God. That meant we couldn’t be racist. But he never gave us a specific prohibition. For example, the autumn before he died he called Barney and me in, told us he had been hearing some disturbing reports about the pool hall in Konawa. “I’d be disappointed if you boys went in there,” he said, and I didn’t go into a pool hall until years after he was dead. Or, when he discovered I had been missing the school bus and making the two-mile walk down to the South Canadian River to while away the hours daydreaming in the shade, telling me I might be happier staying home and helping with the work. I tried that one day, and never played hookey again.

  Mama was a Nebraska-born Anglophile. Her mother died and Mama rode to Oklahoma as a baby in a covered wagon with her father (Grandpa Grove, the only grandparent I ever met), a sister, and two brothers. Her next adventure came when she was farmed out to a neighboring family of German extraction to be cared for until her big sister became old enough to be mother to her. Mama was restored to her family in good health but speaking only German—a situation that caused confusing problems to be laughed about years later at family gatherings.

  As a teen, Mama and her brother Christopher took two teams of horses, a wagon, and a buggy and headed northwest to the Oklahoma Panhandle to become homesteaders. In Beaver County, each of them staked out 160 acres of prairie, built the residences required by the Federal Homestead Act, and settled down to live the time mandated to win title to the land. They cut squares of sod out of the prairie grass, stacked and roofed them to make their dirt-floored homes. They hauled their water in barrels from a creek miles away, lived off the staples they’d brought in the wagon with them (flour, salt, sugar, etc.), augmented by what they could raise or catch. Rabbits were plentiful and prairie grouse could be trapped. (How? Take the top out of an empty flour barrel, replace it suspended on two nails and carefully balanced. Sprinkle on corn kernels. The grouse lands to dine, tilts the top, is dumped in, the top swings back into place, he can’t get out.)

  Their “soddies” were typical of homesteader housing on the high plains—partial dugouts walled with earth. Mama recalled hers as relatively cool in summer and warm in winter, fortunate because neither coal nor wood was available on those vast treeless plains. The fuel for cooking and heating was provided by “buffalo chips.” These dried droppings left by the huge herds of bisons that had recently roamed those prairies burned with pretty fair heat, as Mama recalled it, as well as a distinctive aroma.

  It sounds like tough going but Mama’s memories of it (at least the ones she relayed to her children) were full of fun and happiness. For example, I remember her laughing about their yearning for shade—and the day her brother came by her soddie in their joint-use buggy. Chris reminded her they’d seen trees growing along a creek that drained into the North Canadian River. They packed some food, headed ten miles or so over the prairie and spent a day enjoying both shade and having someone to talk to.

  Mama still maintained that taste for shade and quiet places while mothering three kids. She’d pack a basket, we’d head out for the creeks and woods for picnics, and she would use the time to show us what out there was good to eat and what wasn’t. For example, the wild mushrooms she collected had to pass three tests. She showed how they looked (pinkish white), how they smelled (delicious), and finally how the thin skin on the cap had to peel back. We learned how to harvest the wild poke greens, which grew along creeks so they would return next summer, and never, never, to chew on them until they were cooked. We learned about poison ivy and poison oak, to be careful about where we put our hands when climbing creek banks in snake season. Above all, we learned that it was a lot better to have a skinned knee than to go through life afraid of falling.

  One of the songs Mama sang was a celebration of homesteaders, which involved blowing dust, fleas, frozen mud, bedbugs, etc. “Good-bye to Greer County,” she would sing,

  where the blizzards arise,

  where the sun never sets

  and the flea never dies, />
  where the wind never ceases,

  but always remains,

  til it starves us to death,

  on our government claim.

  I’m not sure how long she lived that lonely life on the high prairie, but it was long enough to gain legal title to her quarter section of land. The price she got when she sold it bought the forty-acre farm on which I endured adolescence.

  Mama loved music (not “wangdoodle” Bob Wills western songs or “trashy honkytonk” tunes) and her favorites came from World War I. “It’s a long way to Tipperary,” Mama would sing, in her sweet, perfect-pitch voice, “It’s a long ways to go.”

  The only pieces of furniture of any value we owned created music. One was a large, black Victrola in which a hand-cranked spring motor played 78 rpm records—mostly of operas and music hall stuff. The other was an upright piano. On that Mama made a musician of Margaret Mary (who is still a first-rate organist) and tested Barney and me on the keyboard until confident we had neither talent nor motivation. Barney played the tuba briefly in the St. Mary’s Academy orchestra. I had my dreams of being a guitarist and entertaining the world with my ballads, but the best I could master was the bass drum.

  I have many embarrassing memories of that musical period (being in the band branded one a sissy) and one happy one. I persuaded (or thought I had) a cute Potawatomi flutist that if she stuck her finger in the little hole through which air escaped when the drum head was pounded, her fingernail would fall off. This caused a lot of booming and giggling during practice until Sister Gregory put a stop to it.

  But back to Mama.

  Sometime after her homesteading period she followed her big sister to nursing school at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Oklahoma City. She joined the American Red Cross nursing service in World War I and was sent to Camp Travis, where she cared for the wounded returned from the battlefields of France and those dying in the great black iwnfluenza plague that accompanied the war. It was a little after that when romance flowered between Mama and Papa. They married at Sacred Heart in 1920. He was a forty-seven-year-old widower caring for two teenaged daughters, his ailing mother-in-law and his aged father. She was thirty-five. If homesteading in the high prairie on the Oklahoma Panhandle didn’t qualify Lucy Grove as a brave and adventurous woman I think that marriage did.

  If the notion that writing is a good way to spend one’s time is inherited, that gene came to me from Mama. Her love of music spread over into the same sort of love for poetry, of stories, of the world of the imagination. She told me once that she had written poetry when she was young but stopped because she had trouble with spelling.

  I inherited that spelling flaw from her, too, plus her tolerance of empty spaces and lonely places. While she laughed a lot about the discomforts and inconvenience of life in a sod house on the prairie, I never heard her complain of the month after month of silent loneliness that homesteading in Beaver County entailed. It was an adventure.

  Remembering that has helped me understand why, when I turned eighteen and notice came from the draft board, she was willing to set me free for my own adventure. By now Barney was in Texas, training to fly Waco CG4A gliders, and as the last available son of a widowed farm woman, I was exempt from military service. I was supposed to stay home and farm. She knew I yearned to go and signed the necessary release. I say with shame I didn’t understand the nature of that sacrifice until I had children of my own. I climbed upon the inductees’ bus at Maud, Oklahoma, nervous and joyful—oblivous to everything except that I was headed for a real war and my big adventure.

  Mama was fifty-eight years old. She packed her clothing, said good-bye to the house she’d loved and the farm she’d bought with her homesteading money, and moved into a rooming house in Oklahoma City. There Margaret Mary was finishing her nursing education at St. Anthony’s Hospital and Mama’s older sister was Sister Monica, the superintendent of nurses. There she supported herself with a job in a hospital sterilizing room.

  Two decades later Margaret Mary, Barney, and I brought her back to Sacred Heart to bury her beside Papa in the cemetery on Church Hill. I remember a mild early summer day, the Zoeller pear orchard below still in bloom, mockingbirds performing in the old cemetery cedars, and the songs of meadowlarks accompanying the graveside prayers. I remembered how Mama had loved days like this. And a host of other things about her that I was now old enough to begin understanding. Such as how she knew I was the sort of kid who needed an adventure.

  7

  The Adventure

  The real war, which was to be my adventure, had to wait a bit even after I signed up.

  First there was the medical examination center in Oklahoma City, which for some reason was called “The Shrine.” There one received a physical examination that preceded the inoculations the Army required. Those ruled healthy boarded a bus for Fort Sill. There we were yelled at by the cadre, issued a pair of regulation brown U.S. Army high-top marching shoes (at last) and a duffle bag full of clothing, and were introduced to what the Army called “military courtesy”—saluting, marching commands, and the other stuff I’d already learned in my semester of Reserve Officer Training Corps. It was there I came to understand what was going on back at the medical examination center when I was led into a room and questioned by a captain. Do you like boys, the captain asked. I said sure, a lot of them. How about girls? Did I have a girlfriend? I said I wasn’t sure. What did I mean by that? I explained that I had a girlfriend named Carol who lived in Ada and I had a date with her just last night, sort of to say good-bye before marching off to war, but when I appeared at her address right on time, her aunt came to the door and said Carol wasn’t there. Why not? The aunt said she couldn’t say. But her expression was sympathetic, causing me to suspect that I no longer had a girlfriend. There was more to that story but the captain had lost interest and hustled me out.

  On the ride down to Fort Sill I met Bob Huckins, who was destined to become a lifelong friend and to be wounded trying to give me a hand when I was blown up at Niefern. Huckins was from Sasakawa, only slightly larger than Sacred Heart, where his father was a merchant and mortician. Yes, he said, the captain had asked him the same sorts of questions. He’d asked the captain what they were about and the captain said it was to determine if we were queer. I had never heard the term. Huckins had, but wasn’t sure what it implied. Need I remind you that we were country boys.

  The Army promptly sent Huckins and me and a trainload of other teenaged Okie recruits to Fort Benning, Georgia, there to learn how to be soldiers in the infantry. We were housed in the ramshackle barracks of an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp, in an area called Harmony Church far from the fort’s regular Infantry School Center. Except for the barracks floorboards, which were as warped as in our Sacred Heart house and through which scrub water poured when we tried to mop them, this was indeed a strange world for me.

  Our training unit was filled with draftees sent South from New York, New Jersey, and the Boston reception centers—all earmarked for the Army Specialized Training Corps. Four of us from Oklahoma, one from Kansas, and two from the West Coast, having posted the same sorts of lofty scores on some test or other, had been added into the mix. This was my introduction to cultural diversity. These were city boys right off the streets of East Orange, Queens, and Scully Square—urbane and sophisticated. They spoke a harsh Northeastern version of English, fast and without the Okie drawl, described strange and exotic customs, and—so it seemed to me—were wiser in the ways of the modern world. On the other hand, few of them knew how to drive a car or harness a horse, understood that milk didn’t originate in the bottle, or had hunted squirrels. Thus our sense of ignorance and inferiority was offset when we got to the firing ranges. All seven of us off the turnip wagons qualified the first time through as marksman or expert and we posted four of the top rifle scores in a thousand-man battalion.

  This isn’t the place to discuss the joys and rigors of getting through infantry basic training. I will linger on it a bit
only because it was here I first began to better understand the connection between the real world and the one I had known through novels and magazine stories. The fierce mess sergeant who starved us so relentlessly was right out of Dickens. Sidney Jablonski, the plump kid from the Bronx who bunked below me and yearned endlessly for battlefield glory, needed only an upper-class Anglo Saxon name to be one of P. C. Wren’s heroes. (He lived the Wren plot idea, too, volunteering for the paratroops and drowning when the tow planes jettisoned their gliders off the coast during the invasion of Sicily.) Our drill sergeant, a survivor of the Aleutians battles, was exactly the sort of cynic Cervantes had in mind as Don Quixote’s assistant. The raw material for fiction was all around in the piney woods but I collected it only for jokes and anecdotes with no idea then that I would have a more serious use for it. For that matter, few of the memories I accumulated there would fit into plots. For example, while Army Jell-O could be stretched and refused to melt it wasn’t useful in fiction. Nor did the faces of the German prisoners of war we used to trudge past on our marches through the Georgia woods. Veterans of Rommel’s Afrika Corps, they studied us, exchanged sardonic remarks, and gave us the feeling goats might have when walking past a pack of caged wolves.