Murder in Little Egypt (4 page)

His drive paid off in his senior football season. He had by then reached his full height of about five feet seven. He went out for left halfback, but at a hundred and fifty pounds, he had to battle for a starting position. There was no free substitution in those days. Players went the full sixty minutes on offense and defense. Dale would have to show that he could bring down bigger boys in the open field.

In the opening game against the Marion Wildcats, Dale received a punt on his own forty-five-yard line and took off, streaking fifty-five yards down the sideline for the only Eagle touchdown in a 7–6 loss and earning himself a permanent starting berth. Against Anna the Eldorado Purple and Gold lost again, and Dale was hurt. He came back in a 26–0 victory over Carterville, scoring an extra point on a plunge through center and intercepting a pass on the twenty-three, zigzagging his way in for the score with seconds left to play.

After the Eagles defeated Johnston City 19–0, the
Journal
singled out “Dale Cavaness, star passer and runner . . . . His brilliant performances in the backfield for the Eagles have sparkplugged his team throughout the season, and his presence has meant the difference between victory and defeat.” Eldorado fans were counting on Dale to bring them their first victory since 1934 against archrival Harrisburg.

Harrisburg versus Eldorado was the local equivalent of Harvard versus Yale or Notre Dame versus U.S.C. The other high school games were played on Friday nights under lights, but traditionally the Eagles faced the Harrisburg Bulldogs on Thanksgiving Day. Families saved the turkey until after the final gun. It was the event of the year for both towns, bigger than the Fourth of July or the Saline County fair. In 1942, because of war shortages and rationing, the game was moved up to Armistice Day afternoon as part of an abbreviated season.

The big game was tense from the start as the favored Bulldogs and the Eagles traded touchdowns. Dale brought the crowd to its feet in the first quarter by heaving a fifty-yard touchdown pass. The Eagles used the old Notre Dame box formation. More and more as the season progressed, the center snapped the ball directly to Dale at left half, and it was anybody’s guess whether he would run or pass. In the fourth quarter he hit his left end eighteen yards downfield for another touchdown. Eldorado lost, 26–25, a heartbreaker, but the Eagles had made twelve first downs to the Bulldogs’ four and felt they should have won.

In a subsequent 12–7 loss to Carmi, Dale tossed a twelve-yard pass for the lone Eldorado touchdown. The Eagles played their final game of the season against DuQuoin in the rain and mud. With the score tied 6–6, Dale faded back to his left and then flipped a pass cross-field to his right for the winning extra point.

The Eagles ended up with three wins against six defeats, but they had scored a hundred points to their opponents’ hundred and twelve, with Dale responsible for nearly half the Eldorado scores. He had proved such a threat that the coach had adapted his offensive strategy to Dale’s talents, and Dale led the Eagles in yards gained on the ground. It was murder trying to bring the little guy down, and he tackled like a freight train. Some of the admiring Harrisburg Bulldogs gave him a new nickname, Toughie.

In Little Egypt no one received as much attention as the star high school athlete. Dale’s performance in basketball during the 1942–43 season equaled his football feats. For a while it looked as if the season would have to be canceled because of wartime fuel restrictions, but parents pooled their allotments of six gallons of gasoline a week to drive the boys to their games. Dale’s father never missed one of his son’s performances unless the railroad kept him at work.

The Eagles captured the Goshen Trail Conference championship with a perfect 20–0 record, and overall they were 23–4. The sweetest win came against Harrisburg, 38–37, to take the Christmas Holiday Tournament crown on Eldorado’s home court. That low score was typical of basketball in the 1940s, when it was more of a defensive contest, featuring ball control and set shots. Although height was less of a factor then, Dale was still the shortest player on his team, and as a guard, his role was primarily defensive. Even so, he managed to score as many as nine points in several games, and he averaged six—enough, when combined with his tenacious defending, to make him a star and the Eagles’ leader. Undoubtedly he would have improved his times in the mile run that spring, but pulled ligaments kept him on the sidelines during most of the track season.

As graduation approached, war was on everyone’s mind. Military training had begun at the high school. Boys could learn commando techniques, how to scale a wall and thrust a bayonet. The government announced its goal of an army of seven million by the autumn. Families that had not strayed from Little Egypt for generations saw their sons shipped off to mysterious places on the other side of the world. Every day the local newspapers printed letters home from sons abroad, almost every one of them expressions of longing for home cooking, the voices of parents, a walk in the southern Illinois woods. One boy wrote that he wished he could write a poem called “These Things I Miss,” listing apple pie, Eldorado’s tree-lined streets, “a date with a pretty American girl. . . . When you are denied so much, you come to expect very little.” Some letters included descriptions of ships blown up and comrades lost; none indicated the exact location of the absent son. Many boys from Little Egypt were sent to Northern Ireland in preparation for D-Day. Families would sit around reading the letters in the paper and talking about them, cherishing Eldorado’s blessings, for all its poverty. Local loyalties and patriotism ran high.

Dale decided that he would join the navy after graduation, instead of waiting to be drafted that summer. As for life after the war, if he made it through, he had his mind set on becoming a doctor.

There was never any question that Dale Cavaness would go to college and rise above his father’s status as a working man. If there was one boy in Eldorado who had ambition, it was Dale, and with his mother urging him on, nobody doubted that he had the will to achieve whatever he wanted. By the eighth grade he had begun talking about becoming a doctor.

To a degree, seeing his neighbors suffer through the Depression influenced his choice of medicine. He learned how important doctors were when so many people could not afford one. All around him signs of medical neglect were manifest. Malnutrition and the anxieties of long unemployment caused a variety of illnesses. Fathers leaned on WPA shovels while children scrounged in empty lots for dandelion and poke weeds their mothers could boil up with a little vinegar. It was not lost on Dale that the Cavanesses stayed well while other families averaged weeks of debilitating illness during the year, minor complaints turning major through lack of proper attention. A classmate had to stay out of school for a year because he had broken his eyeglasses and his parents could not afford a new pair. Toothaches had to be endured, since dental care was out of the question. When teeth fell out, false ones were a pricey vanity.

People relied on folk remedies common in Egypt. Pick an aching tooth with a hickory splinter, then stick the splinter into a freshly dug grave. For measles, tea made from sheep droppings was supposed to speed recovery. A dirty sock tied around the throat cured tonsilitis, while sassafras tea thinned the blood at the end of winter. A drop of buttermilk poured into the ear soothed an earache.

In this gloom Noma Cavaness developed a fondness for attending funerals. No matter what the church, Noma would be there, usually accompanied by a lady friend with similar impulses, singing and praying and joining the procession to the graveyard. Back home she would tell Dale and Peck about the service, about what the minister had said and which hymns had been sung, and often she would draw her moral: If only the deceased had been able to afford medical care, death might have been avoided. Noma had no truck with home remedies. Wasn’t Dale lucky, she would remind him, that when he got sick, they could send for the doctor right away. Otherwise he might be dead. If she had not had a good doctor helping her to give birth to him, she wouldn’t be going to other people’s funerals now. She’d be long under the sod.

Late in January of 1937 the worst Ohio River flood ever recorded swamped the farmlands of Little Egypt, pouring millions of gallons down mine shafts and driving people from their homes all the way from Shawneetown to Harrisburg. A million and a half acres in southern Illinois went under. Thousands who had endured collapsed farm prices, years of unemployment, and the drought of 1936 now lost whatever they had left. Army engineers had to dynamite the levee above Shawneetown to let the waters flow in before they rampaged over the top. At its height the flood stood fifty feet deep in Shawneetown’s Main Street. Most of its citizens reluctantly abandoned historic Old Shawneetown forever to live in tents and eventually to build New Shawneetown four miles inland. As the mayor said, the lives of two generations had been ruined; they owed it to their children to relocate.

Throughout the countryside villages went under, automobiles and farm equipment swirled away and sank, permanently wrecked beneath the flood. Houses caved in, floated off. Some people, refusing to leave, chopped holes in their ceilings and frantically tried to store furniture in their attics before huddling on rooftops to be rescued—if they were lucky. Livestock swam until dead, their carcases caught in trees.

Although Harrisburg was more than twenty miles from the Ohio, backwaters seeped into the town, rising an inch an hour for several days, inundating eighty percent of the area and sending its citizens into refugee centers. Harrisburg’s water and gas plants shut down; lumps of coal became precious; water had to be sent in five-gallon containers from Marion and Eldorado.

It was an economic disaster and a medical one. Women gave birth in schoolrooms, even in boats. Fears of cholera and typhoid epidemics spread, and exposure led to scores of pneumonia cases. Because Eldorado had eight physicians and was the closest town to the flood safe from the waters—Muddy, only four miles away, had to be evacuated—the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the National Guard, and the U.S. Naval Reserve made it their headquarters. The Red Cross set up headquarters in the city hall and in the American Legion hall, and the mayor of Eldorado issued a proclamation asking people to open their homes to the refugees and to donate to the relief fund. Twelve hundred refugees poured into Eldorado, filling churches, lodges, the bank, the Cinderella Ballroom. They arrived in boats on the outskirts of town, soaked and helpless. The First Christian Church became a kitchen and a dining hall, with volunteer women cooking three meals a day for the homeless. Steamers put in at Shawneetown to take people out on the swollen river. Motorboats arrived by train from Chicago and from as far away as Boston for the rescue effort, which was frustrated by a freeze that followed the rains. Men had to dynamite the ice to free the boats, and the weather made the medical situation more dangerous. Eldorado doctors offered free vaccination against typhoid, diphtheria, and smallpox.

Like everyone else in Eldorado, Dale and his parents worked to aid the refugees. Noma cooked. Peck was out with L&N railroad crews rescuing people and providing boxcars for shelter. Dale’s Sunday-school class donated eight dollars to the relief fund, and his grammar school welcomed refugee children and their teachers during the nearly two months that it took for the waters to subside.

The flood became a decisive influence on Dale’s vision of his personal future. In this spectacle of human dependancy, everyone praised the Eldorado doctors whose work, Illinois Governor Henry Horner among· others said, prevented epidemics and kept the death toll in Little Egypt to around forty. Prominent among these doctors was Lee Pearce, whose father had founded and run the Eldorado Hospital before turning it over to his son. It was after the ’37 flood that Dale began talking about becoming a doctor and started paying attention to Dr. Pearce’s daughter, Helen Jean, who was just Dale’s age and in school with him. By the time the two entered high school, Dale was seeing a lot of Helen Jean. She followed his athletic feats, they went to the movies together—there were three picture shows in Eldorado then—and he began dropping by the Pearces’ house regularly.

Helen Jean was a small, pretty girl with short brown hair—kewpie-doll-cute was how some people described her. She was neither as hard-driving nor as successful as Dale in school—as a doctor’s daughter, she did not have to be—and socially she was above him, but with his brains and ambition they were a natural match. Noma Cavaness was jealous of her but could hardly disapprove of so irrefutably respectable a girl. As for Helen Jean’s parents, Lee and Irma Pearce took to Dale from the start. What Eldorado parent would not have welcomed Dale Cavaness as a daughter’s beau and prospective son-in-law? By senior year, Dale and Helen Jean came to be considered sweethearts, marriage a possibility. Most of the other boys had nothing but the coal mines in their futures.

Like Dale, Helen Jean was an only child. Dr. Pearce, a garrulous, homespun man who had tried schoolteaching before following his father into medicine, treated Dale like a son. He showed him the hospital and took the boy on his rounds, explaining various illnesses and their treatment. The more Dale learned about medicine, the more it appealed to him.

Here was a different sort of contest, a competition that pitted the doctor against disease and death. It was also a battle against ignorance. People knew nothing about their bodies. They inclined in Little Egypt to let Jesus do the healing and to regard a cure as a miracle. Dale noticed the awe in which Dr. Pearce was held and the power he wielded over those in his hands.

Power well-compensated. The Pearces did not lack for money. Just as Dale knew that his own family was better off than most in Eldorado, the Pearces were clearly more prosperous than the Cavanesses. By the time Dale was a senior and certain that he wanted to become a doctor once the war was over, Dr. Pearce would invite him over to the house, show him an article in a medical journal, fix himself a highball, and talk about the length and rigor of medical study and the rewards that followed it. Dale would succeed in medical school, Dr. Pearce would tell him over a steak dinner. He had an aptitude for science and a curious mind, and he retained facts. In addition, he had the respect of others, his teachers and his fellow students. Commanding respect was an important quality in a doctor.