Bodark Creek - 33. Chapter 33

For me, the biggest problem with Del being gone was everyone else was just going on as usual. Rosalind was working at the mill, and Dock was poking around their house. Albie had finished with high school and was working four-days-a-week in the drug store downtown.

“I really want to be at the soda fountain,” he told me one Sunday. “And the girls like me well enough to buy milk shakes and sodas. But the owner’s son hogs the fountain, and I mostly have to stock the shelves.”

“I’m sure they’ll give you a chance soon enough,” I promised.

“He’d also like to be the pharmacist,” Dock added quietly. “But that’s a little beyond him.”

I sometimes wondered about that. In most ways, Albie seemed to be normal, if a little slow. “He’s not slow,” Rosalind would say. “He’s deliberate.” Then she’d laugh, knowing it wasn’t true. But Albie was good enough looking and pleasant enough to be around. We just weren’t sure how far he could go.

My older brothers felt they’d gone far enough. Sonny and Dougie seemed to spend far too much of their time talking over when they were going to leave the mill.

“I am past sixty,” Sonny reminded us.

“And I’m right there with him,” Dougie pointed out.

“So there’s no reason for us to spend our days fixing falling apart machines.”

But the mill owners didn’t seem interested in buying new ones. In fact, they hardly seemed interested at all. After the war, the three shifts-a-day slipped back to two, then just to one. No one seemed to mind, because a lot of the extra workers had only been doing it because of the war and didn’t want to work full-time anyway. Personally, I was glad to leave the mill and would be happy never to see its noisy insides again.

“It’s done all right for our family,” Sonny did insist.

“I never said it didn’t,” I agreed.

“But it’s time for me to leave.”

Then he didn’t. And either did Dougie. They drove in from the farm together each morning, and they fixed their worn-out machines all day, then they went back to the farm and worked until the sun went down. Walter also stayed on at the mill, but he’d long ago stopped weaving and was mainly a supervisor.

“That’s just as well,” he said. “Because my hands don’t work the way they used to.”

“That’s because you don’t use them nearly enough,” Dougie half-kidded. Walter had taken to doing a lot less on the farm

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do,” Walter shot back.

“Baby brother’s getting a little cranky,” Dougie warned.

“Baby brother not getting enough sleep,” Sonny guessed.

“Maybe baby brother’s got better things to do in bed,” Walter replied, grinning.

And Sonny and Dougie had to admit they might be a little jealous. But Walter was only five years younger than they were, and all their years were beginning to show.

“I tell Sonny things two and three times,” his wife Ruth told us. “And he never seems to hear.”

“Can he hear, and he’s just not listening?” I asked.

“No, I think that too many years around all that clatter in the mill has finally done some damage. I ask him about it, but he never wants to talk.”

“Dougie doesn’t seem to be have a problem.”

“Well, maybe Dougie’s lucky. Or maybe it will catch up with him yet.”

I didn’t know, but so far I was holding on all right. I still spent most of my days working on the farm, though I also set aside part of every afternoon for writing letters, one to Del and one to Charley. I cheated a little and copied over to Charley pretty much what I’d just written to Del. I always wrote him first. It’s not that I cared any less about Charley. It’s just that I knew he was getting letters from his wife, too, because he always mentioned them. And, as much as we didn’t know about his three early daughters, we did know about his new daughter and son.

“Faye writes me more than Marion ever did,” Charley told me. “And her letters are more interesting. That’s partly because she gets out more, with the other Navy wives, and partly because she’s just naturally smarter.”

Faye was a librarian when Charley met her. She’d been to college.

“I don’t know what she sees in me,” Charley confessed. “With my tenth grade education.”

“You’ve probably read every book in her library,” I assured him. “That’s education enough.”

Susan was also writing Del every day, and on the rare times when Del wrote back, he mentioned that Susan and I were pretty well telling him the same things. “Except she tells me more about what’s happening in town, and you tell me more about church.”

Del didn’t write a lot to me or Susan. If we got one letter each, every other a week, that was a surprise. It wasn’t a problem of the mail getting through, because I got letters from Charley two-or-three times a week. “I hit this ship again and automatically started writing. Twenty years worth of old habits, I guess.”

“Do you like being back?” I asked.

“I miss my family more,” he admitted. “Last time, I didn’t know what I had.”

“Do you write your daughters?” I asked. I meant the older ones.

“I’d write them more if they wrote back. But I think Marion and their new father have something to do with stopping that.”

“They may just be busy with school,” I said. Charley’s oldest daughter was nearing sixteen, with the youngest a couple of years behind.

“Well, if they’re interested in boys, I’m a boy,” Charley protested. “And I can tell them a lot of things about boys they should be careful of.”

“I’ll bet he can,” Martin said, laughing, when I showed him that letter. “Charley could teach us all a lot of things.”

“Are you worried about Pat and Joann?” I asked Martin.

“Nah, I have something Charley never had. A well-oiled rifle.”

I wrote that to Del, thinking it was something Susan couldn’t tell him. But Martin must have liked the story so much he told it to several people. Because all Del wrote back was, “Yeah, Susan just told me that.”

Luckily, Neal never went to Korea, or even into the Army, and I think Martin had something to do with that. It’s not that he went around telling everyone that his wife woke up in the middle of the night with terrible dreams, all because her older son was off fighting. It’s just that one of the men on the draft board went to our church, and I think Martin asked him if there was still a rule saying that no two sons in the same family could serve in the same war. I don’t think there ever was such a rule, though there was some commotion during the second war when five boys from the same family were all killed. And I don’t think there ever was a rule saying that farmers were definitely let out of serving. But a good number of our local boys didn’t go to Korea.

“That’s just circumstance,” Martin said. “Heck, if Neal wasn’t here, the draft board knows I’d just go hire someone to work in his place.”

“What if all the boys were gone?” I asked.

“There’s always high school kids around. That’s what they’re for.”

But Neal didn’t go, and Del came home just fine. Charley was all right, too, but when he got out of the Navy for the second time, he and Faye left Philadelphia. Their four-year-old son had some kind of breathing problem in the winter air, so they moved to Arizona. That hurt me a little. It wasn’t that I expected them to come back to Texas, because I knew Charley was always quietly proud that he was the one person in our family who’d gotten out of it. And it’s not that I thought Arizona was any further from us than Pennsylvania. It was just that if they wanted to live in a place that looked like Texas, why not come home?

“Because there’s plenty of jobs in Phoenix,” Charley said. “And not a lot of new ones where you are.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” I wrote. “All the boys seem to be busy.”

“That’s because boys can do anything,” he said. “And maybe you’re being polite, Addy, but if you also didn’t notice, I’m getting to be a regular old man. I felt that more this time in the Navy than ever before. All the boys treated me like I was their granddaddy. They all kept wanting to buy me drinks.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I wanted to write Charley, because I knew he liked his alcohol. But I didn’t mean to encourage it. And Charley was over forty. There was no mistaking that. He’d retired from the Navy twice now and was starting a new job in Phoenix.

“What are you going to do?” I wrote.

“Same thing as before. Work with radios and television. But now it’s called something new. It’s called ‘Communications.’ Ain’t that a joke?”

“As long as they pay you,” I said.

When Del came home, we had a big party. And Martin prepared me for the fact that Del was going to be different, because of his experience, though I didn’t see all too much of that. Del was still the same polite boy. Though one night at dinner, when we were eating with Susan and her mama and daddy and all, Del said something he’d never would have said before the Army. He was sitting at the other end of our long dining table from Martin, and he said, I’m sure accidentally and not angry at all, “Pass the fucking butter.” For a moment, no one seemed to breathe. Then Martin passed the butter.