After the Flag Has Been Folded (8 page)

That was all the reason Mama needed to make that move to Columbus, Georgia. Linda was going to need lots of medical attention, and she could get it for free at Fort Benning's Martin Army Hospital. So in October 1966 Mama bought a twelve-foot-by-sixty-foot three-bedroom trailer on wheels and had it moved by semi-trailer to Columbus.

I don't know why Mama bought a trailer home in Tennessee and then had it hauled all the way to Georgia, rather than just buying one in Georgia. Her fiscal decisions have often been a source of confusion to me. Mama said that before she bought it she asked the folks if they would move it, and they said they would. She didn't bother to tell them until after she paid for it how far she intended it to go.

M
AMA'S BROTHERS WERE MUCH OLDER THAN HER, WITH FAMILIES OF THEIR OWN TO PROVIDE FOR
, so she didn't ask any of them for help. Since Granny Ruth was dead, there wasn't anyone else around to offer Mama the salve of consolation or sage advice. I know she didn't seek any from Grandpa Harve. Since his stroke, he simply wasn't capable of dispensing comfort or fatherly wisdom.

Of Mama's five brothers, one was dead already. According to the family rumors, Uncle Tub had been poisoned by his second wife, Ollie. In fact, Tub died of scleroderma, a disease that hardens the body's internal organs. But no one ever made mention of the disease that killed Tub, insisting instead that he'd been done in.

Tub had gotten his nickname from Uncle Roy. “I always called him Tubhead,” Roy explained. “Tubhead was for the big head. He was always watching over us younger kids, telling us what to do.” Decades earlier, Uncle Tub, Uncle Roy, and Uncle Charlie had all moved out to Oregon. Mama was just entering her teens at the time. We'd lived with Uncle Charlie and Aunt Joyce in Medford while waiting for Daddy's papers for Hawaii to come through. Uncle Roy got Daddy a temporary job at the Kinzua Lumber Mill. After supper the adults would sit at the dinette table, playing cards and smoking cigarettes until well after midnight.

Frankie, Cousin Barb, and I would stay awake for as long as we could listening to the grown-ups talk. Sometimes in those late hours, our parents spoke of how Uncle Tub got up one morning, ate his bowl of oatmeal, walked out in the backyard, and dropped over dead. Just like that.

Had to be poison, they concluded. How else could you explain the rigor mortis that had set in before the doctor could get to him? And why else did his wife, Ollie, have him cremated, unless she was trying to hide something? She probably deserved that spray of bullets that boy gave her years later. He obviously hadn't wanted her to marry his daddy, or maybe he just didn't like her cornbread.

Uncle Charlie never whispered anything, so we kids were hardly eavesdropping when we heard him tell our folks about how Aunt Ollie and her new husband, Dan Swanson, were murdered in their trailer home in Madras, Oregon. “Ollie was sitting on the sofa,” Uncle Charlie said, “and Dan was sitting at the table working on a fly reel. His boy was outside when he just started shooting up the place. The windows, the walls, everything was riddled with bullets. Crazy boy.”

Uncle Charlie had his own bouts of irrational behavior. He once told me he came to Oregon because he was running from the Tennessee law. Family legend has it that Uncle Charlie attempted to rob a drugstore in Rogersville. Rather than face a jail term, he ran off across the country. Years earlier, Uncle Tub had supposedly done the same thing when he got caught robbing a store at Christian Bend.

“When I got to Oregon, I sent that sheriff a postcard,” Uncle Charlie bragged. “It said, ‘Here I am. Catch me if you can.'”

I didn't know what to think. Charlie was always full of tall tales. I had a hard time imagining Mama's brothers doing anything to attract the attention of a lawman. And I had an even more difficult time understanding how come Mama's brothers would be given over to trouble when their own daddy had been a policeman.

Grandpa Harve served as Rogersville's patrolman for years. Well liked, he was urged to run for sheriff, but he wouldn't do it. Uncle Roy
said it was because he couldn't drive. Grandpa Harve insisted it was because he didn't want to run against his good buddy John Hale. Because it was true that he didn't know how to drive, Grandpa did all his patrolling by foot, doing his part to keep the streets of Rogersville clear of illegally parked cars, suspicious-looking characters, and would-be vandals.

Uncle Tub was the first of the Mayes boys to leave Tennessee and migrate west. Tub and his first wife, Bea, were having marital disputes. He was in the service, but he left his military post so he could come home and tend to the kids that Bea had gone off and left. That absent-without-leave status was Tub's first run-in with the law. Things just escalated from there. Finally, tired of the marital upheaval and ensuing legal battles and financial woes, Tub reportedly broke into a store, where the store owner caught him rifling through the cash register. The owner put a gun to Tub's head and told him to get the hell out. Tub took the fellow's advice and moved away, far away.

Eventually, Roy moved out to Oregon, too, leaving his seventeen-year-old wife, Katherine, and the couple's children in Rogersville. As soon as he got a job, he promised to send her money to join him, and that's how Uncle Charlie ended up in Oregon.

“I couldn't have made that trip without Charlie,” Katherine said. Charlie, who would never father children of his own, helped Katherine get her kids, Wanda, a toddler, and Eddy, an infant, to Oregon via the train. The trip took three nights. Charlie entertained Eddy the entire way.

Charlie was always good with kids; it was authority figures he couldn't handle. Kinfolks hesitant to talk about Charlie's run-in with the law are quick to note, “He was a real renegade.”

I don't know what Grandpa Harve thought of his boys. He never said much, but I figured he didn't like their wild ways none. And even though James was Daddy's brother and not Grandpa Harve's son, I reckoned that if Grandpa's dead hand had worked, he might have used it to knock the meanness outta James, after my uncle
robbed that bank shortly after Daddy died. Instead, Grandpa Harve just sat in that mesh lawn chair most every day, smoking one Pall Mall after another, never saying a word.

 

J
AMES IS
D
ADDY'S
oldest brother, the one he depended on for help. In May 1966, Daddy called James from Hawaii and asked him to promise that if anything happened to him overseas, James would take good care of Mama and us kids.

“Dave called me on the telephone from Hawaii,” James said. “I believe it was after he'd already been to Vietnam. Didn't he come home again for an R&R? I believe it was while he was home for that R&R.

“Dave said he was going back over there and he said, ‘Who knows? Maybe I won't come back. If anything happens to me, you look after my family. Help 'em any way you can.' He let me know it was a tough deal over there. That there was a good chance he might not survive. I told him I'd do whatever I could.”

There was a long pause while James pondered Daddy's last request again.

“I think when he called he had a premonition he wasn't coming back,” he said. “I didn't see it then because your daddy had served in Korea. He was a good soldier. He was on Heartbreak Ridge when it was shut off. He'd managed to survive that. But he didn't make it back from Vietnam.”

At first Uncle James tried to help his brother's widow.

“I went to Knoxville to the airport with Shelby to get your daddy's body,” James said. “I took her there in a 1966 Chrysler Newport. There was a soldier with your daddy's casket. Yes, your mother did have to identify the body. I was right there with her the whole time. Even when they opened the casket. But I try not to think about all that. If I get to thinking about it, it bothers me.”

Mama hoped Uncle James would keep his word to Daddy. She trusted he'd be there to help us. He was one of the first people she called after she found out she was a widow woman. But Uncle James
seemed to have his hands full with all sorts of problems of his own making.

James had married a crazy woman. At least that's what everybody said about Aunt Bon. She was the sister of his cousin Mary Ellen's husband, Paul. I don't think I ever heard Aunt Bon's name mentioned without somebody tacking on the crazy label. But James insisted Bon wasn't crazy, just plumb nuts. Crazy is something you're born with. Nuts is what happens to folks when life knocks them around a few times.

Family members continue to banter about who was more nuts—James or Bon. At any rate, when they first married, Uncle James was a man of ideas. He owned his own TV-repair shop. By 1965, he said he had obtained the exclusive franchise rights to provide cable TV to Church Hill and Mount Carmel. More communities than towns, they neighbored the larger metropolis of Kingsport, home of Kodak's gargantuan Eastman plant and one of the Army's largest munitions plants.

James went door-to-door selling cable systems for five dollars each, no installation fee. Some families paid for three connections per household. James drafted the entire cable system from scratch, and he tried to raise cash for the project. But when the power-company people got wind of it, they hiked their rates from a dollar a pole to five dollars. Eventually, Intermountain Telephone Company bought James out of the cable business for thirty thousand dollars and a guarantee of a job, plus he could keep the money he'd already collected.

By family standards, James was a man of means and a man of his word. I didn't know all this as a kid, of course. I only knew that his boys, cousins Roger and Bill, had their own televisions in their bedrooms. I figured they must be rich.

Yet, despite his seeming successes, on Monday, November 21, 1966—four short months after Daddy was buried—James took a gun and robbed a branch of Kingsport National Bank.

Folks at the barbershop and around town were saying the robber
made off with thirty thousand dollars. But later news reports said the lone suspect had pocketed an estimated nine thousand dollars. According to the
Kingsport Times-News
, this was the first robbery of a Kingsport bank in modern history. It made headline news that very afternoon:

 

COLONIAL HEIGHTS BANK ROBBED: LONE GUNMAN FLED WITH
$9,000
CASH

The physical description alone was probably enough to tip off the local police. The menfolk on the Spears side of the family are creatures of habit. I never saw Pap in anything other than gray slacks, gray work shirt, and gray felt hat. His clothes were always clean and heavily starched. Pap was a trim and good-looking man, so he looked handsome in his outfit, but it never, ever changed. By the same token, James wore the same navy blue work shirt, light gray trousers, and jacket to match every single day. And he had kept his blondish red hair in a flattop buzz cut since he was old enough to pay for haircuts.

The newspaper story humorously noted that the robbery occurred on the first day on the job for Colonial Heights bank president W. R. Teague. There was no word on whether Mr. Teague was amused.

The bank teller, Mrs. Allison, stood next to an empty cash drawer and told everyone who would listen how the lone gunman walked into the bank shaking like a Gospel Mission drunk. A friendly soul, Mrs. Allison commented on the cold weather. The stranger mumbled a response. She went on about her business, writing out bank notices, and then stepping up to the teller window, she offered the fellow some help.

Lifting a pistol with his right hand, and with a steady but urgent voice, the man demanded the teller's cash. “I want your money,” he said. “I want every bit of it. This is no joke.”

Mrs. Allison knew better than to question a gunman's intention. His fingers were gripped around the trigger, and the barrel was pointed in her direction. “Come on around and he'p yourself,” she replied. As the bandit approached the cash drawer, Mrs. Allison didn't bother trying to dissuade him in any way. She opened the drawer all the way and stepped back. “I didn't want to be a dead hero,” she said.

The man never took his eyes off her as he reached into the wooden drawer and with his left hand scooped up all the bills—$9,157 total—and shoved them into the neck of his shirt. A lone dollar bill flitted out. He didn't stop to retrieve it. He issued a warning to Mrs. Allison: “Don't move. Don't try to follow me. Don't stick your head out the door or I'll blow it off!”

Then the man walked out, more at ease than when he'd first entered the bank. Mrs. Allison watched as he walked swiftly past the post office next-door, and again as he paused at the nearby shrubbery and looked back at her. His eyes were piercing, threatening, as if to say: “Remember what I told you now.”

The other two tellers in the bank were totally oblivious that a robbery had just occurred right under their noses.

With a tremor in her voice, Mrs. Allison announced, “Girls, we've been robbed!” Then she turned the key, locked the bank's front door, and called the main office and then the police. Law enforcement officials were swarming the place within minutes.

Mrs. Allison figured they were dealing with an amateur. “Otherwise, he would have gone for the bigger cash in the vault,” she said.

What she didn't know is that the gunman wasn't interested in money so much as he was just trying to find a way to break free from a marriage gone sour. He'd been begging for a divorce. Bon kept refusing him. James was seeing another woman. They were both aggravated as hungry hornets.

Earlier that day, James and Bon had gotten into a row over money. James ordered Bon out of his repair shop. When she didn't budge, he stormed into his office. Bon chased after him. Then, without a second thought, he whipped out a pistol.

“I didn't mean to do anything but threaten her,” James recalled. “But when I swung that pistol around, it was in her mouth. I told her, ‘If you don't leave right now, I'll blow your damn head off.' She left. But that upset me, her messing with my business that way. She was griping about me not making my support payments, but then she was messing with my livelihood.”