No More Bullies (2 page)

And from the blood pooling on the floor of his soul, in the loneliness of his hurt and anger, in the escape of a neutral location, little thoughts were firing off in his mind like forbidden firecrackers:
Oh, right, Mr. T.A., sir, Mr.
Big Tough Guy, Mr. M in miniature. You wouldn't be so
tough if Mr. M weren't around. And as for you, Superjock
and Dumb Thug and Towel Turkey, if I were bigger, if I
were stronger, if I could . . . if I could . . . oh,
man
, if only
I could . . .

But he was a Christian. He wasn't supposed to think such things, so he tried not to.

And he said nothing, and he did nothing, and when the day for gym class came around again . . . he went back. After all, the authorities in his life had made clear certain axioms: He had to be there. There was no choice.

JANUARY
12-13,1951

Chapter Two

S
now, and more snow. Howling wind that shrieked through the cracks. Darkness beyond the headlights of the old car, and in the headlights, white on white on white: frost and ice on the windshield, the snowstorm swirling in the lights like a universe of frantic white flies; and somewhere out there, only sometimes visible, the road, hidden under packed snow, fallen snow, blowing snow.

The windshield wipers were pushing aside ragged arcs of visibility, gathering and stacking the loose flakes but chattering ineffectively over the ice droplets encrusted on the glass. The windshield had the clarity of a shower door.

“Gene, we have to hurry,” his pregnant wife urged, grasping her rotund belly as if holding it would lessen the pain. “They're getting close together.” She stifled a whimper as another labor pain flashed through her body then said just audibly, “We're not going to make it.”

“We're gonna make it, Joyce. We're gonna make it. Just hold on.” With his sleeve he rubbed the condensation from the windshield of their eleven-year-old 1940 Ford. What was water came off. What was ice remained. What was breath became water that became ice just behind each sweep of his arm.
Grreshshunk. Grreshshunk. Grreshshunk
—the wipers kept working, but the blades were beating themselves to death on the ice. They wouldn't last the night. Gene's eyes on the road formed a direct link with his right foot on the accelerator, nursing as many miles per hour as the darkness, the snow, and the road would allow.

Gene was thankful they'd rehearsed this trip, due to a false alarm earlier in the week. Joyce had been sure she was going into labor, and they'd raced the thirty-five miles to Galt Hospital, in the town of Lethbridge, in Alberta, Canada. The contractions eased by the time they got there, and the doctor sent them home again. “It's not time yet,” he'd said. “Soon, but not yet. We'll be waiting for you when the time comes.”

The time came less than an hour ago. They'd gone to bed early, partially to get warm under the blankets since the outside temperature had plummeted to minus thirty degrees. Gene fell right to sleep, but Joyce could only fidget in the dark until, right around 11:00 P.M., familiar pains wrung her body, then subsided, then seized her again within the next ten minutes. She lay flat on her back on the bed, trying to relax, breathing deeply. Was it time? Should she wait to be sure?

She waited, wide awake, listening to Gene snore as the winter wind rattled the windows. The contractions didn't subside as an hour passed. Over the next hour they became more regular, the pain more pronounced. By 1:00 A.M., Joyce was sure. She reached over in the darkness and nudged Gene awake.

“Gene, it's time.”

“Huh, wha . . . time for what? Time! You mean it's
that
time?”

“Yes, I think it is.”

They didn't have a telephone, so they couldn't call ahead to let the doctor know they were coming. All they could do was go and hope someone at the hospital could contact the doctor once they arrived. Huddling together, they made a dash for the car, the vicious north winds pelting their faces with snow until they could climb in and slam the doors shut.

“Brrrr, turn the heater up high,” Joyce begged as Gene turned the key, hoping the freezing winds hadn't caused the car's battery to go dead.

The engine groaned reluctantly. Gene turned the key again.
Errrrhhhrrrrr. Errr . . . Ummunnnhhh!
The car's engine roared to life.

He eased the car away from the parsonage of the quaint country church he pastored and headed across the rugged Canadian prairie, the snow-packed gravel roads vibrating Joyce's stomach as they traveled.

“Gene,” she cried, “slow down or I'm going to have this baby right here in the car!”

“I thought you wanted to get there in a hurry.”

“I do, but the pain is—OH! Hurry, hurry!”

Gene shook his head. Slow down, hurry up—what was he to do? He laid a hand on Joyce's stomach as he pressed the accelerator. “Lord, help us, please,” he prayed quietly. Time was so precious, and there was so far to go. So far.

Their first stop was to drop off their little boy, a toddler, at the home of a minister friend. Then it was back into the car and back into the blizzard. Now the minutes seemed like hours, the arduous cadence of the windshield wipers incessantly reminding them of the ticking away of precious seconds, precious seconds, precious seconds. No other vehicles approached or followed them. They saw no lights from houses, stores, grain elevators, anything. A black, roiling nether world lay just beyond the window glass, and they dared not think about it. They dared not imagine how truly lonely, vast, and vicious the Canadian winter could be.

The road was full of potholes, and the car kept finding them, bouncing and bumping. Then came a jolt downward— Gene thought it was another pothole—but the front end of the car didn't bounce back up. Instead, the car lurched sideways and skidded. They could hear the shriek of metal grating against metal. Joyce screamed, bracing herself against the dashboard. Their bodies heaved forward and then violently backward as the Ford ground to a halt, the front end drooping.

“Are you okay?” Gene yelled loudly.

Joyce pushed herself back up in the seat. She put her hands under her bulging abdomen and pulled gently. “Yes, I think so.” She straightened her rumpled, heavy coat covering the baby. “I don't think we hit the dashboard.”

Gene let his head drop backward on the top of the seat as he exhaled a sigh of relief. “Thank You, Lord.”

“What happened?”

Nothing came to mind. “I don't know, but I better find out.”

“Yes,
please
.” Joyce winced as she felt another contraction grip her body.

Gene reached for his wool cap. “Stay right here. I'll see what we're looking at.” He put on the cap and grabbed his wool scarf. “Make sure the car keeps running so the heater will work; give it some gas once in a while so it doesn't stall.”

“You be careful.”

“I will. Don't worry.” He wrapped his scarf tightly around his neck, put on his gloves, and opened the car door. The bitter cold air, filled with icy flakes, poured into the car as if into a vacuum. He quickly stepped out into the snow, slamming the door behind him.

The Ford's headlights lit the area in front of the car, but it was difficult to see into the front wheel well. As Gene's eyes adjusted to the dimness, he stooped down, felt for the tire—and felt nothing. No tire, no wheel. Only the lug nuts remained, still fastened to the brake drum. He squinted in the darkness, peering through the blowing snow, trying to trace any track the departing wheel might have left. It could have landed in a nearby ditch, but searching for it would be next to impossible.

The car had a spare, mounted on a wheel, of course, so that option made perfect sense. He could replace the lost wheel with the spare, just as if he were changing a flat tire. Tomorrow in the daylight, after Joyce and their new baby were comfortable in the hospital, he could return and maybe find his other tire.

The trunk lid groaned and snapped away the ice in its seams as Gene opened it. He groped, found the spare, then loosened the clamp and pulled it out. He let it bounce on the ice—Good! It still has air in it!—then rolled it to the front of the car where he leaned it against the fender to keep it out of the snow. Now for the tire jack. He shuffled back through the snow to the trunk.

He quickly found a tire iron, but his groping hand couldn't encounter a jack no matter where he searched.

Then it hit him, like a sledgehammer in the stomach:
I left the tire jack in the school bus!

He'd been driving the school bus to make some extra income—pastors of small, rural churches often did that sort of thing—and he'd needed the jack aboard the bus last week. That's where it was, right where he'd left it. He sagged against the rear of the car, filled with frustration for such an oversight. His wife was in labor, their car was slouched forward on three wheels, it was thirty-two below, it was dark, and he had to replace a tire without a jack!

What to do, what to do?
Think!
He looked through the car window. Joyce had leaned back on the front seat, her eyes closed, no doubt confident that her loving husband could rectify whatever the trouble was and they'd soon be on their way to the hospital. No use in frightening her. Let her rest.

What to do? He prayed, “Oh, Lord, help us. There's nobody around for miles, and we're about to have a baby in the freezing cold. What can I do?”

Looking around for an answer, any answer, his eyes fell on a road sign just within the car's headlights, a yellow diamond with a bent black arrow advising of a left turn ahead. It was bolted to a four-inch-by-four-inch post. A long post. Eight feet of it was above the ground, and there had to be at least another two feet under the ground.

A lever.

He needed a fulcrum. He peered into the dark trunk and spied his old, metal toolbox. It was only about eighteen inches long, ten inches wide, and about twelve inches deep, but it was rugged and strong. He pulled the box from the trunk and set it next to the bumper of the car, his gloves sticking to the metal in the cold.

Now to get that post out of the ground. The storm and the snowplows had piled the snow waist-deep around it. Gene pushed his way through, and then he dropped to his knees and dug the snow away with his gloved hands. The ground beneath was hard and crystalline with ice. He attacked it with the tire iron, gouging and chipping, scooping up the loose chunks with his hands. He dug and dug, the knees of his pants soaking through, his eyes watering, his nose running, the frost forming on his eyebrows, sweat pouring down his face despite the bitter cold.
How deep
does the highway department put these poles, anyhow?
He stood up and wrestled with the post. It wiggled!

Gene dropped to his knees again, digging faster, gouging harder, his breath turning to ice in the car's headlights. He stood and slammed into the post with his shoulder, so focused on the task and so cold, he barely noticed the resulting bruise. He went to the other side and rammed it the other way. He slammed into it a few more times, back and forth. More digging and gouging, then some shaking, pulling, heaving one direction then the other. It had to come out. It couldn't be much deeper. Got to keep—

The sign tipped over.

With a desperate heave, Gene pulled the signpost off the ground and dragged it over the snow to the front left side of the car. His toolbox, his fulcrum, was ready. He pushed the part of the post that had been in the ground under the car's bumper and positioned the center of the post on top of the metal toolbox. The road sign at the other end lay flat, about fifteen inches off the ground. With the lever and fulcrum in place, he shoved the spare tire up against the wheel well. If he could raise the car just enough, long enough . . . if he could get the wheel on the lugs quickly enough.
If.
He might only get one chance at this.

He tried the makeshift lever. He could make the car rock upward, lifting the axle and brake drum off the ground, but he couldn't lift it far enough to get the wheel on. He needed more weight on the road sign. Gene looked around in the darkness, hoping that he might find a few rocks that he could pile on the sign, or maybe a heavy log. No such luck.

There was only one thing to do. He looked through the window at his young wife. Ordinarily, she was a small, petite woman, but with the extra weight she had been carrying through the pregnancy, she could barely waddle from place to place. Gene breathed a silent prayer of thanks for Joyce's extra pounds. Her weight, combined with his effort, might be their only hope.

Gene opened the car door. “Joyce! I need your help!”

The cold air shocked her awake. “What do you want me to do?”

“I need you to get out of the car. Wrap up warm. And please don't make any sudden moves. Just very carefully slide out of the car. Here, take my hand. I'll help you.”

Joyce reluctantly tightened her scarf around her neck, buttoned her coat, and put on her gloves. She moved her right leg toward the door, while Gene held both of her hands. Slowly, carefully, she slid her leg out and placed her foot awkwardly in the snow.

“You're doin' fine, Joyce. Just go slow. Take it easy. I've got a good hold on you, so don't worry; you won't fall.”

Joyce struggled to pull herself toward the doorway, getting colder with every moment. Finally, her left foot pushed down into the snow, and she eased upward, Gene's strong hands and arms there to steady her. The moment she was standing, another contraction wracked her body, and she nearly tumbled over in pain. “Oh! Oh, Gene!”

Gene held her tightly until the spasm passed, and then he slowly released his grip. “You okay?”

“I'm fine.” Joyce straightened as best she could. “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to come over here and sit on this sign,” Gene said, leading his pregnant wife by the hand toward the driver's side of the car. “Watch your step.”