It (71 page)

“He let me go then, and I waited to see if his name would go up on the Punishment Roster the next day, but it never did. I guess he must have just told the Loot he missed the inspection because he was teaching a smartmouth nigger who it was owned all the holes at the Derry base—those that had already been dug and those that hadn't been. They probably gave him a medal instead of potatoes to peel. And that's how things were for Company E here in Derry.”

It was right around 1958 that my father told me the story, and I guess he was pushing fifty, although my mother was only forty or so. I asked him if that was the way Derry was, why had he come back?

“Well, I was only sixteen when I joined the army, Mikey,” he said. “Lied about my age to get in. Wasn't my idea, either. My mother told me to do it. I was big, and that's the only reason the lie stuck, I guess. I was born and grew up in Burgaw, North Carolina, and the only time we saw meat was right after the tobacco was in, or sometimes in the winter if my father shot a coon or a possum. The only good thing I remember about Burgaw is possum pie with hoecakes spread around her just as pretty as you could want.

“So when my dad died in an accident with some farm machinery, my ma said she was going to take Philly Loubird up to Corinth, where she had people. Philly Loubird was the baby of the family.”

“You mean my Uncle Phil?” I asked, smiling to think of anybody calling him Philly Loubird. He was a lawyer in Tucson, Arizona, and had been on the City Council there for six years. When I was a kid, I thought Uncle Phil was rich. For a black man in 1958, I suppose he was. He made twenty thousand dollars a year.

“That's who I mean,” my dad said. “But in those days he was just a twelve-year-old kid who wore a ricepaper sailor hat and mended biballs and had no shoes. He was the youngest, I was the second youngest. All the others were gone—two dead, two married, one in jail. That was Howard. He never was any good.

“ ‘You are goan join the army,' your gramma Shirley told me. ‘I dunno if they start paying you right away or not, but once they do, you're goan send me a lotment every month. I hate to send you away, son, but if you don't take care of me and Philly, I don't know what's going to become of us.' She gave me my birth certificate to show the recruiter and I seen she fixed the year on it somehow to make me eighteen.

“So I went to the courthouse where the army recruiter was and asked about joining up. He showed me the papers and the line where I could make my mark. ‘I kin write my name,' I said, and he laughed like he didn't believe me.

“ ‘Well then, you go on and write it, black boy,' he says.

“ ‘Hang on a minute,' I says back. ‘I want to ast you a couple of questions.'

“ ‘Fire away then,' he says. ‘I can answer anything you can ask.'

“ ‘Do they have meat twice a week in the army?' I asked. ‘My mamma says they do, but she is powerful set on me joining up.'

“ ‘No, they don't have it twice a week,' he says.

“ ‘Well, that's about what I thought,' I says, thinking that the man surely does seem like a booger but at least he's an
honest
booger.

“Then he says, ‘They got it ever night,' making me wonder how I ever could have thought he was honest.

“ ‘You must think I'm a pure-d fool,' I says.

“ ‘You got that right, nigger,' he says.

“ ‘Well, if I join up, I got to do something for my mamma and Philly Loubird,' I says. ‘Mamma says it's a lotment.'

“ ‘That's this here,' he says, and taps the allotment form. ‘Now what else is on your mind?'

“ ‘Well,' says I, ‘what about trainin to be an officer?'

“He threw his head back when I said that and laughed until I thought he was gonna choke on his own spit. Then he says, ‘Son, the day they got nigger officers in this man's army will be the day you see the bleedin Jesus Christ doing the Charleston at Birdland. Now you sign or you don't sign. I'm out of patience. Also, you're stinkin the place up.'

“So I signed, and watched him staple the allotment form to my muster-sheet, and then he give me the oath, and then I was a soldier. I was thinking that they'd send me up to New Jersey, where the army was building bridges on account of there being no wars to fight. Instead, I got Derry, Maine, and Company E.”

He sighed and shifted in his chair, a big man with white hair that curled close to his skull. At that time we had one of the bigger farms in Derry, and probably the best roadside produce stand south of Bangor. The three of us worked hard, and my father had to hire on extra help during harvesting time, and we made out.

He said: “I came back because I'd seen the South and I'd seen the North, and there was the same hate in both places. It wasn't Sergeant Wilson that convinced me of that. He was nothing but a Georgia cracker, and he took the South with him wherever he went. He didn't have to be south of the Mason-Dixon line to hate niggers. He just
did.
No, it was the fire at the Black Spot that convinced me of that. You know, Mikey, in a way . . .”

He glanced over at my mother, who was knitting. She hadn't looked up, but I knew she was listening closely, and my father knew it too, I think.

“In a way it was the fire made me a man. There was sixty people killed in that fire, eighteen of them from Company E. There really wasn't any company left when that fire was over. Henry Whitsun . . . Stork Anson . . . Alan Snopes . . . Everett McCaslin . . . Horton Sartoris . . . all my friends, all dead in that fire. And that fire wasn't set by old Sarge Wilson and his grits-and-cornpone friends. It was set
by the Derry branch of the Maine Legion of White Decency. Some of the kids you go to school with, son, their fathers struck the matches that lit the Black Spot on fire. And I'm not talking about the poor kids, neither.”

“Why, Daddy? Why did they?”

“Well, part of it was just Derry,” my father said, frowning. He lit his pipe slowly and shook out the wooden match. “I don't know why it happened here; I can't explain it, but at the same time I ain't
surprised
by it.

“The Legion of White Decency was the Northerners' version of the Ku Klux Klan, you see. They marched in the same white sheets, they burned the same crosses, they wrote the same hate-notes to black folks they felt were getting above their station or taking jobs that were meant for white men. In churches where the preachers talked about black equality, they sometimes planted charges of dynamite. Most of the history books talk more about the KKK than they do about the Legion of White Decency, and a lot of people don't even know there was such a thing. I think it might be because most of the histories have been written by Northerners and they're ashamed.

“It was most pop'lar in the big cities and the manufacturin areas. New York, New Jersey, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, Portsmouth—they all had their chapters. They tried to organize in Maine, but Derry was the only place they had any real success. Oh, for awhile there was a pretty good chapter in Lewiston—this was around the same time as the fire at the Black Spot—but they weren't worried about niggers raping white women or taking jobs that should have belonged to white men, because there weren't any niggers to speak of up here. In Lewiston they were worried about tramps and hobos and that something called ‘the bonus army' would join up with something they called ‘the Communist riffraff army,' by which they meant any man who was out of work. The Legion of Decency used to send these fellows out of town just as fast as they came in. Sometimes they stuffed poison ivy down the backs of their pants. Sometimes they set their shirts on fire.

“Well, the Legion was pretty much done up here after the fire at the Black Spot. Things got out of hand, you see. The way things seem to do in this town, sometimes.”

He paused, puffing.

“It's like the Legion of White Decency was just another seed, Mikey, and it found some earth that nourished it well here. It was a regular rich-man's club. And after the fire, they all just laid away their sheets and lied each other up and it was papered over.” Now there was a kind of vicious contempt in his voice that made my mother look up, frowning. “After all, who got killed? Eighteen army niggers, fourteen or fifteen town niggers, four members of a nigger jazz-band . . . and a bunch of nigger-lovers. What did it matter?”

“Will,” my mother said softly. “That's enough.”

“No,” I said. “I want to hear!”

“It's getting to be your bedtime, Mikey,” he said, ruffling my hair with his big, hard hand. “I just want to tell you one thing more, and I don't think you'll understand it, because I'm not sure I understand it myself. What happened that night at the Black Spot, bad as it was . . . I don't really think it happened because we was black. Not even because the Spot was close behind West Broadway, where the rich whites in Derry lived then and still live today. I don't think that the Legion of White Decency happened to get along so well here because they hated black people and bums more in Derry than they did in Portland or Lewiston or Brunswick. It's because of that soil. It seems that bad things, hurtful things, do right well in the soil of this town. I've thought so again and again over the years. I don't know why it should be . . . but it is.

“But there are good folks here too, and there were good folks here then. When the funerals were held afterward, thousands of people turned out, and they turned out for the blacks as well as the whites. Businesses closed up for most of a week. The hospitals treated the hurt ones free of charge. There were food baskets and letters of condolence that were honestly meant. And there were helping hands held out. I met my friend Dewey Conroy during that time, and you know he's just as white as vanilla ice cream, but I feel like he's my brother. I'd die for Dewey if he asked me to, and although no man really knows another man's heart, I think he'd die for me if it came to that.

“Anyway, the army sent away those of us that were left after that fire, like they were ashamed . . . and I guess they were. I ended up down at Fort Hood, and I stayed there for six years. I met your mother there, and we were married in Galveston, at her folks' house. But all through the years between, Derry never escaped my mind.
And after the war, I brought your mom back here. And we had you. And here we are, not three miles from where the Black Spot stood in 1930. And I think it's your bedtime, Mr. Man.”

“I want to hear about the fire!” I yelled. “Tell me about it, Daddy!”

And he looked at me in that frowning way that always shut me up . . . maybe because he didn't look that way often. Mostly he was a smiling man. “That's no story for a boy,” he said. “Another time, Mikey. When we've both walked around a few more years.”

As it turned out, we both walked around another four years before I heard the story of what happened at the Black Spot that night, and by then my father's walking days were all done. He told me from the hospital bed where he lay, full of dope, dozing in and out of reality as the cancer worked away inside of his intestines, eating him up.

February 26th, 1985

I got reading over what I had written last in this notebook and surprised myself by bursting into tears over my father, who has now been dead for twenty-three years. I can remember my grief for him—it lasted for almost two years. Then when I graduated from high school in 1965 and my mother looked at me and said, “How proud your father would have been!” we cried in each other's arms and I thought that was the end, that we had finished the job of burying him with those late tears. But who knows how long a grief may last? Isn't it possible that, even thirty or forty years after the death of a child or a brother or a sister, one may half-waken, thinking of that person with that same lost emptiness, that feeling of places which may never be filled . . . perhaps not even in death?

He left the army in 1937 with a disability pension. By that year, my father's army had become a good deal more warlike; anyone with half an eye, he told me once, could see by then that soon all the guns would be coming out of storage again. He had risen to the rank of sergeant in the interim, and he had lost most of his left foot when a new recruit who was so scared he was almost shitting peach-pits pulled the pin on a hand grenade and then dropped it instead of throwing it. It rolled over to my father and exploded with a sound that was, he said, like a cough in the middle of the night.

A lot of the ordnance those long-ago soldiers had to train with was either defective or had sat so long in almost forgotten supply depots that it was impotent. They had bullets that wouldn't fire and rifles that sometimes exploded in their hands when the bullets did fire. The navy had torpedoes that usually didn't go where they were aimed and didn't explode when they did. The Army Air Corps and the Navy Air Arm had planes whose wings fell off if they landed hard, and at Pensacola in 1939, I have read, a supply officer discovered a whole fleet of government trucks that wouldn't run because cockroaches had eaten the rubber hoses and the fanbelts.

So my father's life was saved (including, of course, the part of him that became Your Ob'dt Servant Michael Hanlon) by a combination of bureaucratic porkbarrelling folderol and defective equipment. The grenade only half-exploded and he just lost part of one foot instead of everything from the breastbone on down.

Because of the disability money he was able to marry my mother a year earlier than he had planned. They didn't come to Derry at once; they moved to Houston, where they did war work until 1945. My father was a foreman in a factory that made bomb-casings. My mother was a Rosie the Riveter. But as he told me that night when I was eleven, the thought of Derry never escaped his mind. And now I wonder if that blind thing might not have been at work even then, drawing him back so I could take my place in that circle in the Barrens that August evening. If the wheels of the universe are in true, then good always compensates for evil—but good can be awful as well.