Ain't a Terrible Thing
An excerpt from Victory Ruins
Today is Armistice Day, 117 years on. I was thinking this morning of my great-grandfathers, one of whom never deployed farther than New Jersey, the other serving in the 60th Coastal Artillery Corps, heavy artillery that gave the Huns a good shellacking during the St. Mihiel offensive. What must have been their thoughts on that day when they heard the news? And what did they expect their lives would be like afterward? Despite a familial proclivity to preserve our history, I don’t have any accounts of their experiences, not least because my great-grandfather who commanded the big 155mm guns was notoriously reticent about literally everything.
Perhaps, then, this lack of knowing about the Great War was a subconscious drive to writing the character of Wade, the father of the protagonist Arlen, in my novel Victory Ruins. It’ll be three years next week (three years already!) since it was published, and another excerpt is fitting to commemorate the anniversary. In this part, Wade reluctantly speaks of his war, as his son is on the cusp of his own. He is speaking for himself, for men of his generation, and for men of all times who try to make sense of the cataclysms they find themselves caught up in. In the end, there is only one instrument in their hearts that can make sense of what they passed through, and it ain’t a terrible thing.
I hope you enjoy.
“Y’all call a doctor!”
But how? There was no telephone. If someone could have hollered for the doctor, they would have. But even if one of them had the lungs for it, who around would have known what the holler meant? Things weren’t quite that way anymore.
Still, there was plenty of shouting from Arlen as he came toward the house. “A doctor!”
From the barn, Wade came running. Legenia and Arlen’s sister Elizabeth emerged from the back door of the house. They shielded their eyes against the August sun. They didn’t seem terribly worried.
“One of y’all want to help?” shouted Arlen. The weight was about to break him. Only then did Wade begin to scoot over to them.
“Come on Roy, just keep breathin’. Keep it coming.” Arlen pulled Roy’s arm further over his shoulder and hefted his huge friend as much as he could bear.
“Ain’t like I can — aw, shit — ain’t — ain’t like I can stop Arlen. Just — shit — just hurts like hell when I do.”
“Reckon you broke a rib.”
It had been a long hobble from the mule pen and Arlen could not bear the weight anymore. Just as his strength was about to give out, Wade caught Roy’s other arm and hefted the big young man. “Y’all make way!” said Wade as they came up to the back door. Legenia and Elizabeth both got out of the way as they threaded sideways through the door with their gasping neighbor.
“Put him in Arlen’s room,” said Legenia.
“Ain’t no way we’ll get him upstairs,” said Wade, clearly feeling the strain himself.
“Just lay me down on the porch,” wheezed Roy.
“The porch? That’s no place for the boy,” said Legenia.
“Aw, hell, just put him out there!” said Arlen. They dragged him through the house, out the front door, and laid him down.
“No, prop him up, Arlen. He’ll suffocate himself like that!” said Elizabeth.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” said Arlen.
“Pick him up.”
Roy batted away their arms. “Leave me here,” he gasped.
“What happened to him?” said Wade.
“Mule kicked him square in the chest,” said Arlen.
The women gasped. Wade’s eyes went wide. “How come you ain’t dead, Roy?”
“Pa, ain’t like he ain’t wondered it himself,” said Arlen.
“He should be thankin’ the Lord Almighty. A kick square to the chest should have burst his heart. Did you see it coming, son?” said Wade, putting his hand on Roy’s shoulder.
“Pa, leave him be, he can’t talk.”
“That might’ve saved him.” Wade cocked his head back. “Or maybe it’s just ’cause you’re a hoss, Roy.”
Roy nodded through a grimace of pain. “I’m a big ol’ boy,” he choked out.
“You think he needs a doctor?” said Arlen.
“You run out in the truck to fetch the doctor, by the time you come back, Roy’ll be fine or dead.”
“If I’m gonna die,” said Roy, “I need one thing.”
“Oh, Arlen, do it for him,” said Legenia.
Roy waggled his head. “Don’t want it from Arlen.” He raised his eyes. “I need just a peck from sweet Elizabeth here.”
Legenia gasped. Elizabeth snorted, less offended than her mother was. Arlen stood up. “You sonuvabitch, she’s a married woman.” He gave Roy a sharp kick to the side with the toe of his boot. That set off a spasm of racking coughs. “Hope that mule did bust something up in you.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “Arlen, don’t be too upset. Just the courage of a dyin’ man. Brave enough to ask for now what he had years to try and steal but never did.” She leaned over Roy. “Ain’t that right?”
Roy grimaced and it was hard to tell the real pain from the fake.
“Mama, we got to go,” said Elizabeth. “That train ain’t going to wait.”
Wade sighed. “Reckon I got to drive y’all to the station now, don’t I? My work’s got to wait on the world, world can’t wait on me, can it?”
Nobody said anything. Wade was not mad at the world. He was upset that his children wanted their parents to come visit them at their homes, when Wade thought they should come to visit him at his. Elizabeth had tried to split the difference and came for a couple of days before taking Legenia back to Charlotte to help decorate her new house, but it was not enough for Wade. His mind was set: this was the family seat and life did not take place out there.
The woman gathered their bags and took them to the car. Elizabeth bid a farewell to her brother. “You stay safe. Don’t let yourself get kicked. You ain’t got the sense to stay down like Roy here.”
Arlen nodded. “I’ll be seein’ you.” Roy moaned a farewell.
The mule would not be broken today. But Arlen would not give up on it. He went back out to the pen and kept at it until the mule was worn out. Not broke, but worn out. Neither of them had prevailed for the day, but there was always tomorrow. Roy would spend the night and maybe would be feeling better in the morning.
Arlen ate cold biscuits, buttermilk, and ham for supper. The inside of the house was orangish-yellow from the oil lamps on the table. Finishing his meal, Arlen opened the kitchen window. The night air, slightly damp on the skin, came wafting through the house from the open front window. Outside on the porch there was the sound of Wade tuning the fiddle. Short little squawks of the bow on the strings, rough like bristly hairs or pea gravel. Longer strokes — A-A-A-D——A-A-D-A went the notes — were smoother, but not by much. Wade had the bow too tight. Arlen heard him work his way through the beginning notes of several songs, skipping from one to another. Filling a cup with water, he went out on the porch.
Roy was now propped up against one of the porch columns. Arlen handed him the water. He sucked down about half of it before he began to choke.
“Easy now,” said Arlen.
“That mule busted you up pretty well, Roy. You feel any better?”
“Don’t feel better, but I’m feelin’, that’s for sure.”
“Well, that’s something,” said Wade. “What do you say we celebrate feelin’ something. That and the womenfolk not being around.” Wade looked up at his son. “Arlen, you pick a little and I’ll fiddle.”
Arlen knew that picking and fiddling meant more than just that. He was excited. When he came back out on the porch with his guitar, twilight had almost passed, but it was still light enough to see the glint of the bottle Wade held in his hand. Wade was running his finger over his chin. “One of y’all tell me: what did you do to that mule to make him kick?”
“Nothin’,” said Arlen. “That mule’s just a loose cannon. All over the damn place. Couldn’t get the halter anywhere near his face.”
Wade rested the fiddle on his knee. “What changed?”
“That mule’s the same as the day Calvin and I came over to take a look at him,” said Roy. “Ornery, that’s all. Angry, even.” Roy shifted his weight and winced in pain. A racking cough shook his body. He recovered his breath and his face seemed to ease. “I wasn’t sure if we should buy that mule in the first place, but, I’ll tell you, I got even more reservations about it now.”
“Well, we’ll figure out something.” Wade handed the bottle, the cork gone, out to Roy. “Take a few sips of that, son. It’ll help that cough.”
“That what it smells like, Mr. Breckenridge?”
“Drink up.”
They sat in the dark, the lamp light from inside nearly imperceptible to them. They played music and drank one by one from the bottle. Roy said nothing the whole time, for pain and whiskey silenced him, and hardly a dozen sentences passed between Arlen and his father. They only spoke about the songs they played. And play they did, each in his own way. Wade did not fiddle with speed or passion. He certainly could if he wanted to, dropping the fiddle down off his shoulder almost into the crook of his arm and bowing with a sharp, snapping motion of the wrist, hand gripping the bow quite high. At gatherings with neighbors — which came fewer and fewer than in days before — he played like that and some folks found his rhythm so infectious they couldn’t help but make an impromptu dance. But that was Wade in the light, amongst people. He was not a man to wear a mask, but he knew what people thought of him. If he showed them a good time, they would question their own judgments upon him. But any time he gave them mystery and complexity, they found him a baffling character, an eccentric whose set ways seemed to provoke more and more confusion and revulsion as the years went on. He was a living reminder of an uncomfortable fact and both he and they knew it.
Wade knew, too, that manners meant knowing what to show and what to hide and when to do each. So it was here, in the dark, that Wade played, not with speed but with feeling. He had loosened up the bow and Arlen could tell from the sound that it had a better touch on the strings. The tempo seemed to slow and slow some more. Arlen picked the harmony on his cheap guitar, just simple notes backing his father. Wade would hit one note softly and the next one with a quick but deep burst of effort, letting the note blossom from the full weight of his hand on the bow. Then the note would die off in a lonesome taper and there was a nearly soundless pause between it and the next note, which Roy and Arlen hung onto, waiting for the next one, like waiting for another breath that might not come. Each song ended and with only a few words, the next one began in the same pattern. Eventually, Wade stopped and set the fiddle on the porch and folded his hands across his stomach. “You play one, Arlen.”
“I ain’t good leading. You know that.”
“I ain’t tellin’ you to lead. I want to hear just the guitar.”
Arlen fingered the stubble under his chin. “Which one?”
Wade leaned back in his chair. Its joints creaked. “Long way back, I taught you a couple of tunes. You were too little for that guitar, but you got the fingering just fine.” Wade stretched out his hand toward Arlen. “Let me see that.” Arlen handed over the guitar. Wade tucked the guitar in close and hunched himself over it, face intent. He was silent. The crickets chirped and droned out in the thick, warm darkness. Then Wade’s fingers set to the strings and began to play for a minute. He stopped and handed the guitar back to Arlen. “Wasn’t the first one I taught you, but it was the one you played the best.”
Roy finally broke his silence. “What’s the name?”
“Old Stepstone,” said Arlen. “Now that you played it, the tune’s back in my fingers, but the words ain’t in my head.”
“Then I’ll sing it.” Wade licked his lips, leaned forward with elbows on knees, and waited for his cue from his son. Arlen played the tune through one time, then nodded to his father.
“I stand on the doorstep at evening time now, the wind whispers by with a moan.” Wade’s voice was clear but he had added an edge of ache to it. “The fields will be white and I will be gone, to roam o’er this wide world alone.”
Arlen kept playing, head down, listening to the words.
“Goodbye dear ol’ stepstone, goodbye to my home, God bless those I leave with a sigh. I’ll cherish fond memories when I’m far away, to roam o’er this wide world alone.”
Wade abruptly stopped and leaned back in his chair. Arlen quickly finished off the tune, but let the last notes ring in the guitar, fading and giving way to the sound of the crickets again.
“Where did you learn that one, Mr. Breckenridge?” Roy said. His words flowed whiskey-smooth over the cracked rib.
Wade was absolutely stock still and perfectly silent. After a moment, Arlen started to wonder if he had fallen asleep. Then his father’s voice rolled out into the night air. “A feller in the Army with me taught me that song. He was a mountain boy. Can’t quite remember where he was from, maybe up Madison County way. He came down to Hickory, worked in the Piedmont Wagon factory there, and joined up with the rest of us when the war started. We were all nervous, ’cause we didn’t know where we were going. And this feller, his name was Buckner, and he said he already knew what that was like, leavin’ home. Said he’d learned that song when he was young, but he didn’t know how right it was until he moved down to Hickory. I don’t think he ever liked working in that factory. The Army didn’t suit him neither.” Wade took a sip from the bottle and let it wash around in his mouth. “Some of the other fellers didn’t care for him, and I don’t know how much he cared for us ‘flat-landers,’ but I liked Buckner. He taught me that song.”
There was a length of peacefulness after Wade finished speaking. He cradled the bottle in his lap for a while, then set it down on the porch, within reach of them all.
“Was it bad, Mr. Breckenridge?” said Roy loudly, shattering the quiet. He was quite drunk.
“Was what bad?”
“Going off to fight. In the war.”
“Which part? Leavin’ home?”
“All of it.”
“Leavin’ home was hard. I hadn’t ever been farther than Statesville before that.” Wade stopped.
Roy persisted in his questioning. “Well, how was it hard?”
Arlen felt a little sour. He and not Roy should be asking Wade these questions. But I ain’t ever had no mind to ask. Pa never talked about it.
Wade drank from the bottle again before he replied to Roy. “I never had been away from this place and I didn’t know what was out there in the wide world. I was excited, of course I was, but it got to my nerves at times.” Wade stopped. Arlen could not see if he was pondering a point or just had nothing more to say. But eventually his voice cut again through the dark. “Reckon that was because everything was always changing. We were always going someplace, packin’ up, unpackin’. They’d give us an officer, then switch him out after a week ’cause he was a fool, or sometimes promote him because he was too good, and then they’d assign us a fool. There was a lot to learn – marchin’, salutin’, all the little bits of drill. And then we had to just about forget all that when we were put on the line and we had to learn how to fight all over again.”
“What do you mean? They didn’t train you the way to fight?”
“No.”
Arlen had never ever heard Wade’s voice that terse. He felt the need to put himself between his friend and his father, just in case Roy went a little too far. “Pa, I reckon Roy was just curious. Just tryin’ to get an idea of what it was like.”
“I reckon there ain’t much to tell. I didn’t do nothin’ too important. Hell, I didn’t even see a German worth shootin’ at. Only ones I ever came across were already dead or prisoners.”
“So you ain’t ever shot a man?” Roy said.
“I was in charge of laying the wire for the field telephones. I spent all my time hoofin’ back and forth between the major and the telephone exchange in the rear.”
“That’s all you did? Lay wire?”
Wade’s disembodied voice rumbled sternly through the humid purple-black air. “It was an important job. All the shellin’ kept you busy, ’cause the shells would cut the line and you’d have to run out and replace it. There were other fellers who rotated in and out, but not many of ’em liked it. Weren’t much good at it, either.”
“How’s that?”
“If the wire’s cut, most of the time you got to get out of the trench and run out in the open to fix it. If the Germans had a crack shot or a machine gun sighted in, they’d put bullets around you. They’d snap around your ears. Most fellers didn’t like that. ’Course, I didn’t either, but I was good at the job. You boys should have seen me back in my day. I could carry a hog on each shoulder and go anywhere with ’em, even up a ladder. Runnin’ with wire, that was nothin’. There was only one other feller who could do it. He was farm boy like me, from Minnesota. He’d been doing it longer than me, showed me a few tricks. We got on real well, we’d lay wire together. Thing was, he was a mite tall. One day, we ran out of wire and needed more. He told me he’d go back and get more. He scooted down into a shell hole and I reckon he stood up a little bit too much as he went across the bottom. German shot him through his helmet.” Wade cleared his throat. “His name was Arlen. He didn’t have no family of his own, so I named my son after him.”
Arlen’s face flushed. Roy looked over at him, as if he could feel the heat from Arlen’s cheeks. “How about that?” he said. Arlen said nothing. He knew he had been named for his father’s friend. But he had never heard the truth until now. It was a strange time to mention it, strange for Wade to talk about the war so freely. The whiskey was not lubricating the way, there was something else pressing it out of Wade, some other need that did not come from within, but from out there.
Why now?
Before Arlen could speak, though, Roy was at it again. “It was a rough time, then?” Roy asked Wade. “Did you have some close calls?”
Wade’s voice was very low. “Yes.”
Roy forged ahead with his questioning. “Mr. Breckenridge, I just want to know what it was like,” he said, his words slurring from the drink. “And I reckon I wanted to know what we have to do if there’s a war. I mean, what do you think we should do, Mr. Breckenridge, when we get into a war?”
Wade took his time and his voice was very low when he did speak, but reply he did: “Do what’s right. Do your duty.”
“I’m gonna do my duty, Mr. Breckenridge, I guarantee you that. You mean my duty to my country, don’t you?”
“If that’s what your duty is.”
“Well, ain’t that duty, Mr. Breckenridge? Weren’t that your duty? Why’d you go to fight?”
Wade’s voice was no louder than before when he eventually spoke. “I won’t go into why we went, what we thought we were fightin’ for. Doesn’t matter now, because none of it came to pass, not like folks said it would. But going was the right thing. Not going would’ve been worse. And a man’s duty ain’t a terrible thing.”
The hairs on Arlen’s neck prickled in a wave to the top of his scalp.
If it ain’t terrible, then why does he sound like it is? And how can stayin’ here be worse?
Wade hefted his bulk out of the chair and slowly bent over to pick up the fiddle and bow. “All right, boys, now that’s enough. I’m going to bed. Roy, you going to be all right?”
“If I’m still warm to the touch in the mornin’, you can count on me for breakfast.”
“Arlen’ll fix up a place for you to sleep. See y’all in the mornin’.”
“’Night, Pa.”
“’Night, Mr. Breckenridge.”
They didn’t say anymore. Arlen just took the bottle from Roy and had another long pull, then set to barely picking the guitar, no louder than the crickets.