On The Wings of Heroes (2 page)

“He's the biggest kid on the block,” Mrs. Jewel Hiser said from her porch, over the spirea, “that Earl Bowman.”

. . . were country folks who'd retired into town when Hitler invaded Poland. Mrs. Hiser had seen newsreels of refugees fleeing the Nazis along rural roads, pushing all their belongings in baby carriages.

She believed the rumor that if we got into the war, there'd be no gas or tires. We'd all be trudging along on foot like the refugees. So the Hisers bought the second bungalow from the corner behind the box elder tree. There they settled into their porch swing to await invasion.

Mrs. Hiser said she saw World War Two coming before Roosevelt did. Way before. She'd never been easy in her mind since the
Hindenburg
blew up, which she said was a Sign. She was a great one for Signs and could describe the exploding
Hindenburg
like she'd been on it.

Passengers burning alive staggered on fleshless feet through its melting steel skeleton. Mrs. Hiser had a fine sense of doom and kept a scrapbook of clippings about automobile accidents and house fires.

Her tales were always worth hearing again, unless you were my mom, who said once was all she needed. The Hisers played to a full porch for the one about a nephew of hers who'd skidded on his sled. He shot under an International Harvester truck and scalped himself.

They were living history to me, the Hisers, older than Dad. Mr. Smiley Hiser drove a 1930 Essex. Mrs. Hiser had played piano for silent movies before talking pictures came in. She played by ear, whatever that meant, and could render any song as long as it wasn't new.

If you asked her for “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” or “Mairzy-Doates,” she'd just look at you. But to show us what real music was, she'd spring out of the swing and slip indoors to her upright piano. We waited for the crack of her knuckles, then “Yes, We Have No Bananas” or “Too Much Mustard” or “If You Knew Suzy” or even “Papa Get a Hammer, There's a Fly on Baby's Head” pounded out in the night.

Both Hisers were musical, though Mr. Hiser was deaf. When they sang “Just a Song at Twilight” in close harmony, they held hands. Which amazed me in people of their years.

On hot nights Mrs. Hiser remembered a boy cousin of hers who got lost in the Blizzard of 1896, between the cow barn and the house. He froze nearly to death and shook so bad he bit off the tip of his tongue.

“How did you get him to stop shaking?” somebody always had to ask.

“We never did,” Mrs. Hiser recalled. “We just tied him to the churn and made butter.”

We hung on her words and waited for the cackle of her laugh. She kept a lace handkerchief down the vee of her housedress for wiping under her glasses because she seemed to be laughing or crying most of the time.

“Get her to tell you about Jimmy Johnson and the cornpicker again,” Dad mentioned to me one night after supper. I didn't ask why.

You could hear a pin drop whenever Mrs. Hiser ran that one past us. It was a ghost story, and she'd seen one.

“You want to hear that again?” she said, later on in the evening, closer to lightning-bug time.

Scooter was on hand that night, and the Bixby sisters, and me, naturally. We perched in a row on the porch rail under the hanging ferns. The story was about the early days of mechanized farming when the tractor took over from the team and the motorized cornpicker came in.

The cornpicker revolutionized farming, but it had a flaw. You wanted to be careful or it'd take your hand off. There was a generation of one-armed farmers because of it, so this was a story right up Mrs. Hiser's alley.

Mr. Jimmy Johnson was their country neighbor down in Moultrie County. He was a good farmer, but slow to adapt to modern ways. He bought himself a cornpicker, then lost a hand pulling stalks out of the snappers because he'd neglected to shut down the engine.

She could make you see that ripped-off hand vanishing into the chomping cornpicker. In some of her tellings it wrenched the whole arm off at the shoulder. Popped it off like a wishbone.

Mr. Johnson had stood there in shock, watching the cornpicker eat his arm, along with his shirtsleeve and the button on his cuff. In all her tellings, blood went everywhere. Mr. Johnson left a trail of it up to the road, where he died in a drainage ditch. The Bixby girls clung to each other. Scooter's profile was freckled green chalk in the twilight.

“Everybody turned out for the funeral,” Mrs. Hiser remembered, and Mr. Hiser nodded. “Will I ever forget Jimmy laid out in his coffin? The blacksmith carved an artificial arm to fill out his sleeve, with a hook at the end. Crossed on his chest was his good hand and the hook.”

We quaked on the railing as the coffin lid closed, and I was real alert now.

There was more to come, as we knew. How well Mrs. Hiser remembered a certain night weeks later. From her country kitchen door she saw a strange and far-off light, down the picked rows of corn in the late Mr. Jimmy Johnson's field.

Now she was on her back step, dishrag in hand, drawn by the eerie, changing glow. It was like a bobbing lantern, but different. She'd stood transfixed beside her cream separator.

By now I was pretty sure Dad was under the porch, or in the spirea. He had to be around here somewhere, about to improve on the story and scare us all senseless. I was trying my darnedest to be ready.

“Then I saw Jimmy Johnson out there in his field,” Mrs. Hiser said, almost too quiet for Mr. Hiser to hear, “real as the living man, with a lantern in his only hand.”

I listened hard for Dad, but he seemed to miss his moment.

“He held the lantern high, and he was looking everywhere,” Mrs. Hiser said. “Then I heard him myself, a voice that moaned like the windpump.

“‘Where's . . . my . . . hand?'
the ghost of Jimmy Johnson cried.

Beside her, Mr. Hiser turned to Mrs. Hiser. Scared himself even after all these tellings, he reached for her. Her hand reached back, to close over . . . a wooden arm with a hook at the end.

Her head bobbed like a blue jay when she saw this inhuman thing in her lap. The hook gleamed. She gasped, and her corsets creaked like a ship in a storm. When her scream split the night, porch lights winked on.

Jimmy Johnson's cold hook had appeared in her lap in place of Mr. Hiser's hand. Mrs. Hiser rocketed out of the swing. When she came down, her lace-up shoes hit the floor hard enough to drive tacks. Jimmy Johnson's artificial arm, back from the grave with hook attached, rumbled off across the uneven porch. Mr. Hiser set his heels to keep from pitching out of the swing and bent double with laughter. Dad had to be doing the same, a house away.

We never heard the cornpicker story again, though we always asked for it.

I'd noticed Dad at his workbench in our basement, turning an old table leg on his lathe, fixing a coat hook to it with a wood screw. It was similar to the one that reached for Mrs. Hiser. How Mr. Hiser hid it till the right moment, I didn't know. He must have sat on it there as they swung, together in the swing.

. . . played hide-and-seek till the first frost when the leaves fell from our hiding places. We heard the Hisers' stories and heard them again until a chill in the air sent the storytellers inside. Then came Halloween. Something in Dad lived from one Halloween to the next.

For one of my first ones he'd carved a pumpkin big enough for several candles. It leered from our porch larger than life, beside the front door. I remember the smell of scorched pumpkin pulp. The rest is common knowledge.

Bunches of boys roamed Halloween night, big boys from somewhere on the far side of the park. They didn't trick-or-treat or wear costumes, not even sheets. They were there to soap your windows, shave your cat, pull siding off your house, do something nasty down your mailbox, knock over pumpkins. Dad couldn't wait.

The spirea bushes around our front porch closed over his head when darkness fell. Dad had lit the pumpkin, prepared the porch, filled the buckets at his feet down among the spirea roots. Now he waited. No gang of boys could match his planning, his patience.

They came, drawn like moths. It looked so easy. They grouped down by the box elder and sprang from tree to tree, sprinting across our yard. They were quiet for boys as they brushed past the spirea on their way up our steps. The one in the lead carried a baseball bat to flatten the pumpkin. Ganging closer, they crested the porch. Then their world went awry.

The porch floor rattled like hailstones under their feet. The leader's boots went out from under him. His bat took a wild swing at nothing. He fell flat on his back, measuring his length on a floor thick with ball bearings.

It was a hard fall, and the wind shrieked out of him too late to save the others. They dropped in every direction as the ball bearings spun like steel marbles under them and cascaded down the steps. The boys behind took the full weight of the ones ahead. They grabbed and grappled and fell in a gaggle down the noisy Niagara of the steps.

When they were in a heap at the bottom, Dad rose out of the dark and the spirea to let fly with the first bucket of water. Still, they couldn't find their feet, or words, and they were drenched. It was a cold night with a ring around the moon.

Their leader was still on the porch. He rolled off his back and whimpered as the ball bearings bore into his hands and knees. His arms skidded, his elbows bounced. Dad had another bucket just for him.

At last they grunted off across the yard, gathering speed. Their knicker legs were slick and clinging, and they were still running into each other, all their mischief forgotten. They didn't look back to see Dad there, sprouting out of the spirea, grinning like the pumpkin.

I got a bat out of it, not quite a Louisville Slugger, taller than I was. Years after, you could still find ball bearings, like rabbit droppings, down among the spirea roots.

. . . before the war, Scooter Tomlinson and I went out trick-or-treating in masks one final time. Now that we were in Cub Scouts, we figured we were getting too old for this type of thing. We'd been at it for years, ringing doorbells in the dark, demanding our treats. Tootsie Rolls, Cracker Jack, home baking, all that booty before the war took the candy away, the sweetness.

I came home in the night, dodging shadows, whistling in the dark. The Pluto mask was parked on top of my head. I was swinging a sack of treats.

The Hisers' box elder tree was the center of our universe. The other landmark was the 1928 Packard coupe parked out in front of our house. It was Dad's fishing car. He drove it to work, one of the biggest, heaviest cars ever built. It was thirteen years old and looked older, and no particular color now. The front bumper was a two-by-six plank. When Dad fired it up every morning, people awoke four blocks away.