Dawn of a New Day (3 page)

The rally was held in the Convention Center, a rather grandiose name for the largest building suitable for such a rally in Fort Smith, Arkansas. It was just off the square, very close to where Isaac Parker, the hanging judge during the days of the Indian territory, had stood and watched the men he sentenced hang. The gallows were still there, at least a replica of them, with the ropes dangling down, and Prue, who had visited the place once, felt a chill as she thought of the executions.

Now, however, they were inside the Convention Center, which was packed, and John Tyler constantly nudged her with his elbow or poked her with his fingers, a nervous habit of his. “You're gonna love this guy Kennedy,” he said. “He's from the rich Kennedy family, you know.”

As he spoke, the moderator finished introducing John Kennedy, and the politician came to stand before the podium.

“Why, he's so handsome!” Debbie exclaimed. “He looks like a movie star!”

Kennedy was, indeed, a handsome man—a florid face, a broad, white smile, tousled hair that gave him a boyish look. He looked trim and fit, and for forty-five minutes he spoke in his Boston accent, strange to the ears of these Arkansas folk, but whatever it is that gets a man attention, John Fitzgerald Kennedy had it. Prue understood little of what he said. She was still sick at heart for the disappointment that had come at discovering that this was not to be a date at all, at least not for her. She looked bitterly sometimes at Debbie and with almost something like pain at Mark who put his arm around the blond girl from time to time, but who mostly listened to Kennedy.

Finally the speech was over, and Kennedy smiled and said, “I would like to take a few questions. Our time is short, so I can only take three or four. If you will.” He broke off, saying, “Well, young man, I see you're the first volunteer. What's your name?”

“My name's Mark Stevens, Senator Kennedy.”

“What's your question, Mr. Stevens?”

Mark had a good, strong voice, and he said, “Mr. Kennedy, on our currency there are the words, ‘In God We Trust.' Do you believe this?”

A shocked look swept across Kennedy's face. He was a Catholic, of course, and had already gone through intense grilling. He had not expected it from what appeared to be a high school student in the backwoods of Arkansas. Now he said, “I don't think my religion is the issue here.”

“Why, Mr. Kennedy, the founders of our nation believed in God, and as I've said, our currency says we trust in him. I'd like to hear your comment on how that will affect you if you're elected president.”

Kennedy's lips drew tight, and he lost his smile for a moment. “You're not a reporter in disguise, are you, young man?” Laughter followed his remark, and Kennedy regained his good humor. “When I'm elected president,” he said, “you'll probably be a star reporter for the
New York
Times
. I want you to come to my first news conference, and I'll guarantee you I will answer any questions.” He sensed the mood of the audience, however, and said, “Of course I believe in God, and I believe in the values that the fathers of the nation have set before us….”

After the meeting was over and the four students were on their way home, Debbie said, “I was so thrilled that he answered your question.”

“He didn't answer my question.” Mark shrugged. “He just gave me a politician's noise.”

From the backseat John said, “Why, he claimed to believe in God.”

“Almost everybody in America claims that,” Mark said as he swerved to miss a pothole in the road. “I caught him off guard a little bit, but he's a good man.”

The car sped on through the darkness. As Mark settled down to the long drive back to Cedarville, Prue noticed that Debbie had moved as close as possible and Mark's arm had fallen around her shoulder. He steered the station wagon expertly with his left hand, and once she saw Debbie turn her face up and whisper something. Mark's head came around, and he gave her a quick kiss, then turned his eyes back toward the road.

Prue got out of the car when Mark stopped. He had let the others out already, and she had seen him take Debbie up to the front door, where they had remained longer than was necessary. When Mark had come back he was whistling and happy. Now Prue got out and said, “Thanks for taking me to the rally.”

“It was fun, wasn't it?”

“Yes, it was. Good night, Mark.”

She moved on into the house and found her parents still up.

“You didn't have to wait up,” she said.

“Wait until you have a little girl going out on her first date and coming in at two o'clock in the morning,” Dent said, but he was smiling. “Did you have a good time?”

“Yes. It was nice.” She walked over to her parents, kissed them both, and went upstairs to her room.

“She don't seem very happy,” Dent said. “I thought it was going to be fine for her.”

“She'll tell me about it tomorrow, Dent.”

The next day Prue did tell her mother the full story, and when she said, “I thought it was going to be a date, but it was Debbie that he was interested in. Not me,” Violet remembered her own hard times. Now she came over and put her arms around this tall daughter of hers and said quickly, “Your turn will come.”

“No. It never will.”

P
rue entered her bedroom, singing under her breath Johnny Preston's version of “Running Bear,” but as soon as she stepped inside she stopped dead still and looked wildly about. She had left her room in good order, but now it appeared as though a bomb had gone off. The drawers of her chest were opened, and clothes were pulled out; the snacks she kept on top of her desk were all opened, and over on her dressing table, beside her bed, sat the culprit, a yearling coon who had a jar of cologne in the clever fingers of his right paw and the top in the other. He stared at her, eyes beady, then dropped the bottle and cap, leaped off the dressing table, and scurried across the floor. When he reached the girl's feet, he reared up and pawed at her knee, his mouth open as if he were trying to speak.

“Bandit! What in the world have you done?” She stared down half filled with anger but amused at the same time. Her father had brought the coon home from a hunt, and she had raised it on a tiny doll's bottle filled with condensed milk. He had grown rapidly, and though she usually kept him outside in a pen, she had brought him up to her room earlier to play with him. A call from her mother had drawn her away, and now twenty minutes later she came back to the wreckage that had been her room.

“Bandit! You're a bad coon!” she scolded. The coon opened his mouth, and seeming to grin, pawed at her knees, making a plaintive noise in his throat. Stooping over, Prue picked him up and cuddled him as if he were a baby, holding his head beside her face. He nibbled at her ear gently, as he always did, and his tiny feet clutched her blouse. Despite herself, Prue laughed and shook her head. “You're a charmer,” she said. “Now, look at this mess I've got to clean up.” She put the coon down and wagged her finger at him. “Now you behave yourself while I clean up the mess you've made.”

Quickly the girl started putting the room in order, stopping long enough to turn on the radio of her new stereo set. Ray Charles began to belt out “Hit the Road, Jack!” and when he had finished, Ricky Nelson's voice filled the room, and Prue sang along as he crooned “Travelin' Man.”

Soon she paid little attention to the music and did not actually care for most of what she heard. Keeping one eye on Bandit, who seemed content with the stick of peppermint that she gave him as an offering, Prue completed her job, then hesitated for a moment and glanced at the clock. Quickly she turned, opened the door, and stepped into a room no more than eight by ten. It had been used as a storage room, perhaps as a bedroom, by her grandparents, but Prue had made it into her own special treasure room. She had transferred her diary there and for the past year concealed it in an old horsehide trunk with a curving top. The shelves were filled with items she had kept from her childhood on, including baby rattles and the toys that she had grown up with.

At one side of the room was an enormous chifforobe made out of cherry. It reached almost to the ceiling and was fully four feet wide. Taking a key from a gold chain around her neck, Prue unlocked the armoire and swung both doors open, thinking,
It's nice to have a private place like this
. She pulled out a twelve by fourteen pad covered with canvas used by artists, and snatched up a piece of charcoal. She glanced at the variety of paints that she had collected, mostly odds and ends, then turned and went out into the bedroom. Sitting down on the bed with her legs underneath her, she held the pad steady with her left hand and with her right began sketching the raccoon as he sat sucking on the peppermint. Her hand flew fast, and in a very short time she had captured the animal just as he polished off the candy. He dropped to all fours, came scurrying over, and clamored up on the bed, reaching for the pad.

“No you don't!” Prue scolded. “You can see it, though. That's you, Bandit.” She studied the sketch she had done; it had caught the animal just as she wanted it. “Now,” she said, “I'll begin painting it tonight if I have time, and you'll have your own picture.” She reached over and picked him up, and he lifted his paws up to touch her face. She touched her nose to his and laughed. “I'll bet you'll be the only raccoon with a portrait by a famous artist.” She laughed, put Bandit away, then went back and replaced the canvas and charcoal. Closing the door, she locked it and dropped the key back down the front of her shirt. She heard someone calling and stepped outside, then opened the door to her bedroom. Her mother was calling, “Come for supper!” and she called back, “All right, Momma. I'll be right there!”

She went down the stairs, taking them two at a time, and set the table for her mother. Soon her father came in and washed his hands at the sink in the kitchen despite his wife's protests. “We've got a bathroom for that!”

“If this sink is good enough,” Dent grinned, “for my grandpa to wash his hands in, it's good enough for me.” He dried his hands, came over, kissed her soundly, and she pushed him away. “That's the trouble with marrying a younger woman,” he said. “They're hard to train up. I should have married an older woman.” He had married Violet when she was extremely young, and he was a bachelor in his early thirties, but he had aged well, and people often took them to be about the same age.

They all sat down around the old oak table, and Dent asked the blessing, ending by saying, “And let the Wildcats win that football game tonight. Amen.”

“Dent, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!” Violet said with exasperation. “God doesn't care who wins that ball game.”

“Lots of folks do, though,” Dent said. “Don't see any harm in prayin' for a little edge. Louisville's got a bigger, faster team than Cedarville. Mark and John will have their work cut out for them with all those big linemen crashin' in.” Mark Stevens was the quarterback and John Tyler played tight end for the Cedarville Wildcats; they had already been visited by college scouts.

Prue smiled at her father, who winked at her, and filled her plate full of green beans, fried okra, new potatoes, and two pork chops. She ate all that was on her plate, listening to her parents talk mostly, and then she polished off an enormous slice of fresh peach pie.

She got up to clean the table as her mother said, “Don't forget. I've got to go to the Missionary meeting tonight.”

“Well, I did forget,” Dent said. He reached over and grabbed Prue's arm as she started by and said, “Let's me and you go to that football game tonight.”

Prue said, “It's too cold to go.”

“You can wear your momma's fur coat.”

“She cannot wear my fur coat, but she's got a perfectly good wool jacket. Do you want to go, Prue?”

“I guess so,” Prue said. She helped her mother wash the dishes, then went back upstairs to dress for the ball game. She got ready early and entered the storage room and removed her diary. Coming back, she wrote firmly on the first clean page:

She sat there for a moment staring at the page, then put down:

The sound of the radio filled the room. It was Johnny Horton singing “Sink the Bismarck.” She hummed along with it for a while and thumbed through the pages of her current journal. Kennedy had been elected president, of course, but in April he had nearly lost his popularity when an invasion of Cuba called the Bay of Pigs had failed. She turned a few pages, noted that Gary Cooper, her favorite actor, had died and that Alan Shepard had gone into space. A few pages later she had made a note that Roger Maris had broken Babe Ruth's home run record.

As she studied the pages, somehow she sensed that things were not quite right. John Glenn had orbited the earth, but the war in Vietnam had gotten worse. Just the previous month, in October, President Kennedy was in trouble again when the Russians were putting missiles into Cuba. She had sat up with her family during what was called the Cuban Missile Crisis, wondering, all of them, afraid that it might mean war. She turned away from that page quickly, not wanting to think about wars, and then read her entry stating that Marilyn Monroe had died. She remembered, for some reason, that the star's death had made her cry. She was not a fan of Marilyn Monroe, but the actress had seemed so beautiful on the screen, and so full of life, and the thought of her lying cold and dead—a suicide—had struck some chord deep in Prudence Deforge's heart. She shut the book abruptly, put it back in its hiding place, then went downstairs.

Her mother had left, and her father was shrugging into his red and green mackinaw and pulling a wool stocking cap over his ears. “Well, we better get going.” He stopped to look at this daughter of his critically. “You sure are gettin' pretty, Prue,” he said, studying the oval face and generous lips of the young woman. “How old are you now? I forget.”

Accustomed to his teasing, she said, “I'm seventeen, and I'm six feet tall. I wish I was six inches shorter. You think I can have the doctor shorten my legs? Cut a part of them out?”

Coming over to stand beside her, Dent, who was six foot three, said, “You're just right. A man likes a woman with some heft to her.”

“Thank you, Daddy. Now come on, and let's go to the game.”

The game was much like other high school football games. Partisans for each side seemed to grow crazy when their favorites scored or performed some good feat on defense. Even Prue, who did not understand all the intricacies of football, could appreciate Mark Stevens' play. He had a grace about him as he took the snap from the center, backed up, waited until the last minute, then fired a short pass right over the line, once in a while lifting one that carried fully fifty yards. Prue winced every time the bullish, opposing linemen knocked him down, but he always got up, and she could see a grin on his face.

It was a low scoring ball game, but the Wildcats won fourteen to ten. When it was over, Dent said, “You want to go down and congratulate Mark?”

“No. I'll tell him tomorrow on the way to school.”

Leslie Stevens had just finished his pie at supper and was drinking his third cup of coffee, complements of his wife, Joy. He had come to appreciate this wife of his more with every passing year. Joy kept her figure, and better than that, she had turned out to be an excellent mother for Mark. Les himself had grown frustrated at times with Mark when he was very small, but Joy had never wavered. His glance slid around the table, and he felt a satisfaction and a sense of well-being at his family. His business had prospered too. He had gone into electronics, and now everyone in the county knew that if anything electric went bad, Les Stevens was the man to see.

“Did you hear who's going to be in Fort Smith for a concert next Thursday?” Les asked.

“No. Who is it?”

“It's Bobby Stuart.”

“Really? Prudence's cousin?” Joy said with surprise. “I can't believe he's coming to a little place like Fort Smith, Arkansas.”

Bobby Stuart had become one of the rising rock-and-roll stars of America. He was the son of Jerry and Bonnie Stuart and the grandson of the late Amos Stuart. Bobby's brother, Richard, was now a minister in Los Angeles, and his sister, Stephanie, had married a newspaperman named Jake Taylor in Chicago. But it was Bobby who got the headlines.

Les shook his head. “I don't know whether the Stuarts should be proud of that boy or ashamed. Nice to see a young fella succeed, but this rock and roll—I just don't like it. Something is wrong. Kids seem to go crazy.”

Mark had been eating his second piece of pie, and he swallowed a huge mouthful to say, “Well, like it or not it's here to stay. What with Elvis and people going crazy over him. I don't care much for it myself, but I have to admit it gives me a thrill to see one of Prue's kinfolk who's a star.”

“Maybe you'd like to go over and see the boy,” Les said. “I got two tickets.” He fished into his shirt pocket and said, “I traded O. M. McCoy one of Henrietta's litter for 'em. I think he got the best of the deal. That's gonna be a fine coon dog!” He looked over and said, “Would you like these tickets, Mark?”

Mark nodded, his eyes brightening. “I sure would!”