No Heroes (5 page)

The conversation stopped, but I knew he wanted to talk. We both stood awkwardly. I studied his large hands, once so adept with a football and basketball, now gnarled and battered like old tools. He was missing two fingers.

“What are you doing these days?” I said.

“I'm a logger and a tobacco farmer. Guess I'm what you'd call an endangered species. I'm getting out of farming. No money.”

“What'll you go into next?”

“I don't know. I ain't thought that far ahead.”

A child began to cry and Nine-Mile smiled apologetically and hurried away. Like many generations before him, he was engaged in the only industry offered by the land where he was born. Stores give credit until the tobacco harvest and every fall the new clothes on schoolkids will tell you how the prices are running at the burley auction. Nine-Mile lived on land his family had always owned and made a living from.

He retrieved a five-year-old girl and held her against his chest. Nine-Mile's face softened to the boy I remembered, and it occurred to me that I should have lived in an earlier time. I'd still have the same personality, the same ancient soul. Born in the eighteenth century, I'd lament having missed the wonders of the seventeenth. If I were living in the Renaissance, I'd probably feel nostalgic for the Middle Ages. Continuing this way would make me a Cro-Magnon in a cave envying his brethren who still lived in the trees.

I left the video store with several movies for the kids. The afternoon sun leaned into the hills across the parking lot, surrounded by chain stores that manacled the land. Across the vast sea of black tar stood Wal-Mart. People were excited when Wal-Mart first arrived until the low prices killed local stores. Now there is nowhere else to shop. It cares as little for its customers as the old company store in my hometown did. The only difference is that scrip is legal in the form of a charge card. If Wal-Mart doesn't carry an item, you are compelled to do without. People accept this with typical mountain resignation, putting a melancholy forward spin on it with a new slogan: Everything's at Wal-Mart. Technically that's true, because if something isn't there, it does not exist here.

Behind Wal-Mart like a ramparts to the hills is the first planned development in Rowan County. The neighborhood was such a success that the Church of God closed its doors in town and built a new one behind the mall. It is now known as the Wal-Mart Church of God.

One is tempted to say that Wal-Mart killed what was once a thriving town. One could just as well blame the interstate. The real culprit is the end of the rail industry. This was preceded by the decline of the riverboat era, the invention of the horseless buggy, the westward expansion, the discovery of the Cumberland Gap, the European invasion, the Puritan pioneers and subsequent waves of immigration, the voyages of Columbus, the Viking explorers, the landbridge walkers, the death of the dinosaurs, and the great breaking apart of the continents.

All of this ruined Morehead in twenty years.

I knew Irene when she was ten years old. We used to go for vacations together. She was just a girl. I was a boy. I found Irene after they shot her mother. She wasn't even crying, she was just laying there. There were at least eight, nine people in the room. And that room was ten by twelve feet. The beds were separated by a curtain for some kind of privacy. The smell was magnificent. Electricity was on and off. I spent the first night with my wife in this Devils kitchen. What do you say to somebody who's lost everything? She couldn't save her mother; she was just devastated. What do you say to her? Let's make the best of it? I said nothing. She just laid there in my arms. The next day I told her, you're gonna be with me as long as we can.

In camp, if it was not going the way I like, I never despair. I disconnect my thoughts. I don't think about the tragic things. I think of something else which is more pleasant or nice for me. When I disconnect I think that just surviving is the most important and then forget about it. I have terrible fear. I suffered the most from fear. I was scared of everything around me, but when I disconnect, it's like not me. Somebody else.

We eat potato soup, the skins. That saved us because that's the most healthy part, but they didn't know it. Once a week a piece of bread. All the women stopped menstruating.

As a girl I wasn't very happy. My sister was dead and my father was dying. So my mother did everything for me. She picked my clothes. She pick my friends. She pick what I do, where I go, what I eat. In camp she picks nothing. For the first time, I have freedom.

The odd thing about this book is I never set out to write it. The audiotapes were intended for the kids and the rest came from my journals. When I hit on the idea of bringing these disparate narratives together, I called Arthur for permission to use the tapes. There was a long silence on the phone, until he said, “To write this book, Sonny, is like telling the lions not to eat the antelope.”

Now I call him once a week to double-check facts and details. Spelling Polish proper nouns is confounding, and my attempts at syllabic representation produce gobbledy-gook. Our conversations trigger his memory and I take notes as we talk. Soon, I begin transcribing all that he says.

Arthurs life is hard now. His neighborhood in Queens has changed and no one will shovel snow from his walk. His car inexplicably became filled with ice, his basement with water. Irene has Parkinson's disease and requires a great deal of care. He is a little depressed. I ask if he's reading, and he says yes, a book on the Spanish Inquisition.

He is not angry at the German army because he was a soldier and understands the mentality of serving ones country. He feels most betrayed by his fellow Poles, especially members of the Jewish Police.

As the conversation begins to wane, his voice takes on a tone of concern.

“I don't want to ask, Sonny. But something is nagging at me a little.”

“It's all right, Arthur. Ask me anything.”

“What bothers me is this. How will you link the two stories. The war and Kentucky. What joins them?”

“I don't know, Arthur. I'm worried about that myself.”

“You figure it out, Sonny. I have faith. Maybe something subliminal.”

“The ending,” I say. “Maybe the ending will pull it all together.”

“All endings are the same, Sonny. You die. The scene in the
Titanic
movie was the closest I've ever seen to the camps—one against the other. The good people don't survive. You have to push a little to get into the lifeboat. There was one scene of two old people watching it all, then they went to their bed and lay down and waited to die. At that point, I could not look. It was my attitude exactly. But I lived. I always lived. That was the problem. I lived.”

I hang up the phone, impressed by the prescience of his concern. At first I thought the notion of home would bind the narratives—my constant desire to return, his utter commitment to never go back. My original plan was for us to visit Poland together, but he refused. I suggested a trip to Israel, and again he refused. Traveling to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., was also dismissed.

I considered making a trip to Poland alone, visiting Kraków, finding cemeteries, standing in the very room where Arthur was born. This seemed as depressing a prospect as reading about the Inquisition and I quickly abandoned the plan. In fact, all my ideas seemed pathetic. I finally decided that the ending would be whatever happened during my life while writing the book.

Mrs. Jayne lived all her life in Morehead, and if she had not always been content, she'd made her peace long ago. Occasionally she'd tell a story about going to Lexington with her girlfriends, referring to the trip as “a bunch of country women on the loose.” Mrs. Jayne was my first-grade teacher.

She loved the boys and girls of Haldeman, and we loved her back in the fierce way of children who express elemental emotion with every cell in their bodies. Her house held photographs of people she'd taught, their spouses, their babies, their grandchildren. She was a widow with no kids of her own, and her former students served as family. Each year I sent Mrs. Jayne a Christmas card. I visited when I went home and several years ago I'd introduced her to Rita. All my grandparents were dead. I wanted Sam and James to know Mrs. Jayne.

I drove to her house, thinking of the car I owned in college, a red Maverick that leaked Bondo at the seams. To save money I parked in Mrs. Jayne's driveway, which was a block from campus. She said she liked seeing the car and knowing one of her first graders had made it to college.

Now Mrs. Jayne was in her eighties. She never locked her door and was hard of hearing. To visit, you walked into her breezeway and began calling yoo-hoo to avoid startling her. Today she didn't answer and I found her asleep in an easy chair. I gazed around the living room at all the photographs, including one of my sons propped on the mantel. When I was a kid her house was the most proper I'd ever been inside, containing stiff furniture that was uncomfortable to sit on. Later I understood that she lived among lovely antiques that she kept neat and clean, despite using them daily. Now I recognized that everything was a little messy—a pillow on the floor, a rumpled afghan, a water stain on an end table. I tiptoed out. The kids were disappointed and I told them we'd visit the Rowan County Public Library.

I was the first kid to step inside the library when it opened in 1967. The head librarian was Frankie Calvert, related by marriage to Mrs. Jayne. One woman taught me to read and the other placed books in my hands each week. I loved them as a child and my devotion had never faltered.

Due to the library's limited holdings, you could only check out four books at a time per library card. Since I read at least one book a day, and more during school vacations and weekends, I circumvented the rules by getting library cards for all my siblings, two of whom were not yet in school, as well as a card in the name of the family dog. My mother went to town every Saturday for groceries. She dropped me at the library where I borrowed twenty books, stacked them in a grocery bag, and waited for her to retrieve me. By age ten I knew the Dewey Decimal System inside out.