Preface

Frank and Erik thought that a person could become a man if he was to fix fence; pull wire, skin logs; wear out the gloves. My mother thought that same person would develop moral character if he would carry water to her maple saplings. Not the close ones by the house, she said, but the far ones, over by Savage’s wheat. My father said a small person should learn to plan ahead, think a problem through, be lighthearted, cheerful, ready to help whenever needed. It would also be good to do the algebra homework, and geography, too, and it would be good to clean the barn, and it would be good not to be so sullen on just any old gray February afternoon.

Which was fine. But a man needs the thin edge of the sword every now and then. My father said, well, forget the sword this is not Horatio Hornblower country. Swing a sword around here and you might stick a chicken. So there was the real world and there was my world. I was ready to cast away on a frigate for the Indies but the only water around was the Highline Canal which was dry all winter and in summer washed up at City Park lake in downtown Denver, definitely not the Indies. I wanted to twirl from a lanyard in a typhoon, maybe save a king. Nobody in Arapahoe County knew what a lanyard was, but it was right near there with great waves and winds and frigates and some kings and I liked the combination. Well, said the father—who substituted for king in most situations—the rains come and the winds blow and the universe does not stand still for small boys who swagger. Cheer up and pull the weeds in the asparagus.

This is to say that in cottonwood country there was no way for an ordinary boy to become a man without serious mental bending. Frank said to skip the Woolworth’s candy, “leave it lie,” he said, and “save your egg money for college.” Erik said that if a person was to clean his chicken coop and keep the boards tight on the hog pen and keep the irrigation ditch cleaned, all on a regular basis, this would be a person who pretty much had the makings. Work and Erik were like slop and hogs. He thought it would be honorable to die of exhaustion. “Get it done now ... won’t have to do it tomorrow,” he said.

It didn’t make any difference, as far as I could tell. Tomorrow, there was always plenty of wire still to pull. Erik just naturally liked to sweat and huff and pull and yank on things. My father was a victim of the same attitude. He said, “try holding off acting brave and proud, swaggering your hips when you are only carrying water buckets to the pig. Brave and proud is not needed to slop the hog.“

Out where we lived, the most important things were wheat and calves and a long walk under the cottonwoods to school. In spring the wheat greens up slow and in fall the leaves brown down slow. Summer races by too fast to get a grip before Fair is over and Curtis School begins its annual program of small boy mind numbing. I never saw a stage coach hold up or a real shoot out or a revolution to overthrow the Mexican government. We never discovered gold after 1858 and there had not been a calf rustling even in the memory of Mrs. Fredrickson. If Fredrickson did not know, it was not known. There was therefore almost nothing ever to be brave and proud about except sneaking up on ground squirrels or winning a horse race or surviving the great Big Bend disaster of Carlos Rhea.

Still somehow I eked brave and proud from nothing. This is the story of how I did it. Other people have the fortune to grow up deprived. They can complain and snicker and dishonor the rich. We grew up lucky. Enough money for weekly hamburgers. Snickering generally disapproved of. Every advantage except one and this was permanent. I was the youngest. The two older boys sat through and passed Mrs. Post's math class with flying colors, like they were born to know certain stuff. They could also turn a lathe and they could ride Smoky the gray mare like Apaches on the wind. I could ride that mare until I hit the sharp turn at the Big Bend and fell off. I could not pound a ten-penny spike worth a darn. It was too big and I was too small. Things like that upset a man. Over the years it was pretty much the same. No matter how much smarter I got, they kept out there ahead, like lead cranes in a “v” going south and I flaggle flapped along behind.

My father said I could learn how “cheerfulness comes from work,” sort of like freedom from slavery. So this book is about how cheerful comes when a person is corral gate high until he gets to about the age where he starts pressing his Levis to impress certain people of the other type who stand by the fence and watch when he goes past. This is cottonwood and wheat country, the 1940s, the Great War just over. The time we got was borrowed from a world that was always fighting. My parents were trying to make me reasonably honest, honorable, hard working and humble. I was just a little attracted by what is wicked and famous. It took awhile to get everybody stretching the same wire.

The First Leaving

The Russians called it The Great Patriotic War, a name far more hallowed than simply World War II, as if wars could be numbered without meaning, or as if we might say here’s one, there’s another one; this one’s six, that one’s seven. The Russians still speak about that conflict as if the history of the world turned upon that one great event. And they were right. At least they were right for me. It changed my history, too.

The Russians sent off 20 million, and I sent off only one. But I remember how that one was sent, and how it was the end of one time and the beginning of another.

I remember how the five of us were crammed into the ‘41 black Chevy, how we drove into the mountains for one last camping trip. How on Monday he would be gone. How this one weekend, this winter campout, was supposed to hold all the memory, hold all the love, be a symbol, be a metaphor, make the leaving be only physical, but not real, not in the heart, not where it mattered.

He drove of course. He always drove in those years. And I remember her in the front seat beside, the three of us wedged in back. One last chance to have fun, she said, before he goes. She wouldn't say, “before he goes to war.” That would let in some recognition, the unspeakable, that war and death go together, so she just said, “before he goes,” and we sat grimly, the three of us under 12, me coming on to seven, knowing that wherever he was going it would be uncommonly long this time, and it would be awful.

There was snow in the forest. The black road turned and weaved through the hills. The wind was cold. God had not picked good weather for our last weekend.

We twisted and turned until finally my father stopped in the middle of some desolate cold woods and said, as he always did, “This will do.“

He led the way into the forest beneath barren trees and tromped down snow to make a place for a fire. Then we scattered like refugees through the woods searching for dry wood. I remember how frosted leaves crunched under the thin crust; I can still hear their crushing sound, can still feel my cold toes. I don't know what month it was, but it was winter on our faces, winter as we hunted for dry firewood, winter in our hearts, winter at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.

My woolen mittens soon soaked sopping wet, and then my fingers hurt. In no time I stood by the fire site stomping my feet, holding my arms, whimpering. Snowy branches, snowy leaves. No place to sit down. Snow on my steaming shoes, inside my gloves, in my eyes; blubber rolling down from my nose. For once my mother seemed helpless; wait, she said, the fire will be warm soon. But there was no hope in her eyes. This fire would not warm her fingers. This fire would not cure her cold. She would not show it, of course. We were all having our last weekend, and she wanted his memory to be sweet.

Somehow we slept the night there in the snow. We rolled thin sleeping bags as close together as we could, and each time anyone moved, which was all the time, I awoke shivering. In the morning there was no cereal, just left-over steak from the night before. Cold steak in the snow tasted too salty, too dry, too much like the last supper. Then we drove silently home. On Monday morning she put the three of us boys on a school bus and said that when we came back he would be gone.

I came home that afternoon under a dusky sky to a quiet house. There were no lights on. I found her sitting alone in the living room. Darkness slid down leafless branches to hover at the window where she was staring. I crawled into her lap. I did not know what she knew. I did not know what war meant. I did not know where Germany was. I only knew he was gone. Our gentle, good man, she said, would be gone a long time. A very long time.

I do not remember that ever before I had seen her so sad. I began to cry. She held me. I went on for a long time, whimpering softly. She did not say anything and I did not say anything but she kept me close.

The sun went down. The other boys came in. I sat quietly in her arms. For us the war had begun.