Slap Your Sides (4 page)

Y
OUR SON IS YELLOW
was the next graffito to appear on our store window, written in paint, and after that
BUD YELLOWBELLY!

Dad hired a watchman, Slim Hislop. He sat overnight a few parking spaces from the store, in one of the trucks we used to haul merchandise to and from trains.

New Year's Eve was special to the Hislops; their kids came from all around. So that night I volunteered to fill in for him. Tommy said he'd keep me company because Lillie Light was at a Mennonite affair.

There was a big party at Wride Them Cowboy, all local merchants and their families invited. It was a restaurant in the heart of town, about four blocks from our store. All the waitresses dressed like cowgirls. Since the war most of them were older cowgirls. The younger ones were working for the other Wride, the onion man and Radio Dan's sponsor.

Tommy suggested we take turns looking in on it.

“Not me,” I said. I was in blue jeans. “I'm not dressed for a party.”

“You don't have to be dressed for Buck Wride's party!” Tommy said. But he was wearing the gray flannel
pants and black turtleneck sweater Aunt Lizzie had given him from Santa. Before he'd mentioned the party, I'd wondered why he'd worn the long overcoat and the fedora to sit around in the front seat of a truck.

“If I was going to
any
party,” I said, “I'd be going to the one at Friends School.”

Even if I could have gone to that one, I doubted that I would have.

There'd be the same talk there always was in school, about how badly the war was going. Tommy said everything was turning around finally, and we were winning, and anyway at Sweet Creek High the kids tried not to dwell on our defeats—it wasn't good for morale. But at Friends most of the kids were Quakers. A lot of them felt these enormous guilt pangs about things like our troops surrendering to the Japs on Bataan, U-boats off the Atlantic coast sinking merchant ships headed for British ports, and the goose-steppers marching through Europe. Kids were debating what they'd do when they had to register for the draft, and a few were even questioning what right
anyone
had to be a conscientious objector in a war we could lose.

Since there was only one CO from Sweet Creek so far, the conversation usually got around to Bud. Nobody knocked him, not at SCFS, but some would ask me how he justified this, or that, and I'd tell them, “Ask him! I'm not him!”

Tommy said, “If you go to Wride's, you'll know plenty of people. Even Hope's going with Abel. Dad asked
her, and she said yes.”

“That's just who I'd like to see the New Year in with: Abel Hart!”

“He's not so bad, Jube. He's got a lot of guts not registering for the draft. He'll be going to prison…not jail, either:
prison.
For years!”

“He gives me the creeps, Tommy.”

“A lot of visionaries are eccentric. But Abel's not going to be just a witness against the war—he's going to be a witness against the whole idea of conscription. Don't you think that takes guts?”

“I'm not sure anymore,” I said. Before our country went to war, I was
so
sure. In school we'd recite the Litany of the War Resisters League:
If war comes, I will not fight…. If war comes, I will not enlist…. If war comes, I will not be conscripted…. If war comes, I will do nothing to support it…. If war comes, I will do everything to oppose it…. So help me God.”

“I know how you feel,” Tommy said. “You know what I did last week? You won't tell Mom and Dad?”

“No, of course not!”

“I bought some war stamps at school.”

“I think Dad would understand. But Mom wouldn't,” I said. “Did they make you buy them?”

“They don't
make
you, but they make a big thing out of it when you don't! Some kid'll say ‘Maybe you should be back at SCFS, Tom. Maybe you miss hanging out with cowards.'”

“If they said that to me, the last thing I'd do is buy
the damn war stamps!”

“Sometimes I wonder if I should have transferred from Friends School,” Tommy said. “All for basketball!”

Tommy took a pack of Camels out of his coat pocket, shook one up, and caught it between his lips. Then he scratched a match.

“Since when are you smoking?” I asked.

“A couple of months. Bud smokes too.”

That was news to me. I said, “How does he afford it?” No one in a CPS camp was paid. The Society of Friends gave the COs $2.50 a month toward
all
their expenses, from toothpaste to underwear. German POWs in America received 80 cents a day for any work
they
did.

“Bud saved most of what he made at the Harts',” Tommy said. “But I don't think he's got that much, and he needs to see a dentist. If you ever want to do him a big favor, send him some cigarette money. Not the cigarettes, though. They'll get stolen.”

“I remember when I used to know what my brothers were up to.”

Tommy snickered. “Yeah, and you still do. I know you check out my graphs. And I know you read Bud's letter. I put a paper clip on top of it and shut that bottom drawer very carefully…and guess what wasn't there when I looked in my desk drawer next.”

“Do you think I like being a sneak? It isn't fair, you know. I'll be fourteen in March.”

“Fourteen!” Tommy exclaimed. “My my!”

Before he put out his cigarette, he blew a smoke ring, grinned at me, and said, “How's that?”

“Go on to the party,” I said. “I know you don't want to sit here with your little thirteen-year-old brother on such a night as this!”

“You're right, little bro. On such a night as this, I need to find me a girl!”

“Good luck,” I said.

 

I had a plan and a pocket flashlight to carry it out. I was going to begin reading what Natalia Granger said was the dirtiest book in the English language. It was called
God's Little Acre
, by Erskine Caldwell, and it had arrived that afternoon (in exchange for Tommy's socks) complete with the “good parts” marked by paper clips.

It was set in Georgia, and the characters had names like Ty Ty and Darling Jill.

I read the “good parts” first—there were plenty of them. I'd look up and watch the store in between hot passages. There was a light snowfall beginning. Pilgrim Lane was quiet. It always was around ten at night, and New Year's Eve was no exception.

When I'd finished all the good parts, I went back to the beginning. It was an easy read, and I got right into it. I got way into it. When I remembered what I was there for, the culprit had already started to paint a yellow stripe across the store window.

I shoved the paperback book into my pocket and very
carefully opened the door of the truck. When my feet touched the ground, I reached behind the driver's seat for the lariat Tommy and I had put there. Last summer Bud had taught Tommy and me how to lasso. Some of the horses at the Harts' were tamed, trained, then sold to the Mennonites to drive their buggies. We had to know how to catch and tame them.

I shut the door quietly and went toward the fellow in a crouch, holding the rope, my heart pounding because I'd never tethered a person. He was moving fast, leaving the paint can behind him, running the brush in a long yellow line.

I figured I could handle him easily once I had him. He was smaller than me, thinner, too. He had a wool cap on, and a red-and-black mackinaw jacket.

I swung the rope.

“Gotcha!” I called out. I'd pinned his arms, and I pulled hard.

Then, as he dropped the paintbrush and tried to move his arms some way that would budge the rope, I got myself over to the door. I slammed my weight against it and triggered the alarm.

The siren sounded. Burglar alarms in Sweet Creek had to sound like loud duck calls, so as not to be confused with a fire alarm or an air-raid alarm.

But the police would know there was trouble at E. F. Shoemaker's.

“Damn you! Why'd you call the police?”

He sounded like a kid, like someone younger than
me, and I started walking toward him. “Did you think you were going to get away with it?”

“I'm going to catch hell unless you get me out of here! Get me out of here, Jubal!”

“Who's talking?” I couldn't see the face under the cap.

“Take the cap off, why don't you?”

So he wouldn't try any tricks, I sprang forward and grabbed it, then jumped back.

The brown hair spilled down to her shoulders, and her mouth tipped in a snide grin. “You roped in a girl, Jubal! Get me out of here!”

“Darie Daniel?”

“The police are going to be here any minute, Jubal Shoemaker! I'll never, ever forgive you if you get me in trouble!”

“You got
yourself
in trouble!”

“Then get me out! I'm tied up like an animal, for Pete's sake! JUBAL?”

I was already on my way to her.

T
hat was the beginning of my fascination with Daria Daniel. I was the only one who never called her Darie. I vowed that I wouldn't that first night we met, after we hurried away from the police and the paint bucket and the yellow stripe on our store window. We went to The Sweet Creek Diner, where she ordered a coffee and I ordered a Coke.

“Never call me Darie,” she said. “Promise? I'm trying to outgrow that name.”

“I promise.”

What was I doing promising her
anything
? My loyalties should have been with my big brother, not her. My eyes and my mouth weren't paying any attention to my thoughts.

“My father's real name is Lucio Danelli. I can understand why he changed Lucio to Dan, because kids called him Lucy, but why did he let my mother talk him into changing our name to Daniel?”

“Did she ever give you a reason?” I asked her.

“Yes. She claims it's best not to be too much of one thing. Don't be too Italian or too Jewish or too Irish.” Her eyes looked directly at me. “Or too Quaker,” she said.

Oh, great! I thought, just great. I said, “How about too Catholic?”

“Same thing.” She shrugged. “My mother's nothing. She's Protestant or something. Now she goes to St. Peter's most Sundays because of the war.”

After the waitress brought our order, I looked across at Daria, wondering why I was afraid to ask the question I was about to ask, wondering what there was about her that made me want her to like me. She was about my age, I knew, but I always felt a lot younger around her, and I didn't have a reason for that either.

She was putting heaping teaspoons of sugar in her coffee, her brown hair touching her shoulders, the checkered cap cocked over one eye.

“Daria, why would you mark my father's windows? Do you think my father had anything to do with Bud becoming a CO?”

“I don't know.” She looked up at me with these sea-green eyes of hers. She was blinking as though
I
made
her
nervous. That was a laugh. She said, “My mother says your father was never really religious before he met your mother.”

“He's not really religious now.”

“I guess the most religious person in your family is Bud.”

“My mother, and then Bud…. Then me.”

“Are you really?”

“I'm not passionately religious. Sometimes I envy people who are. But I believe in God. And I think I feel
strongly about what's right and what's wrong.”

“I'm not that religious,” she said, “but since the war, I go to church every Sunday like my mother.”

“Who put you up to painting our window, Daria? Radio Dan?”

“
Daddy?
Oh, my gawd, you don't know Daddy!”

“Just what I hear over the radio. You're not supposed to clap your hands until the war's over. You can only slap your sides.”

“I wouldn't think
you'd
listen.”

“I don't always listen.”

“Daddy doesn't like to make enemies, not even of slackers.”

“Don't call my brother a slacker! You don't know anything about him!”

“I know he's letting my two brothers fight for this country, when
he
won't.”

“What Bud is doing is for this country,” I said. “He's trying to stop sending guys like your brother off to war!”

“But that won't stop Hitler! How do you stop Hitler?”

“I don't know,” I said. Even kids at Friends admitted Hitler was a different kind of enemy.

“It was my idea to mark the windows, Jubal! It's the least I can do, with both my brothers risking their lives. Let me ask you something, Jubal. Suppose there was a mad dog loose on our street, foaming at the mouth, his ruff up, his teeth bared as he went after people. Would Bud just walk away and leave it up to my brothers to
make the neighborhood safe again?”

“There aren't any dogs involved, Daria. Just human beings like us.”

“Why should Danny Jr. and Dean have to fight them and not Bud?”

“Because Bud doesn't agree with our government that the only way to stop madness is to become mad yourself.”

She sighed and shook her head. Finally she said, “Jubal? Let's not talk about this. You can report me to the police—I don't care. But let's you and me just be friends, and leave the war out of it.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Me too.”

I told her I wouldn't tell on her if she'd vow not to go near the store window again. She said she wouldn't, because she thought she really liked me. I
knew
I really liked her.

I showed her the Caldwell book and told her about my cousin Natalia, and she said she would rather live in Greenwich Village than anyplace in the world because a poet named Edna St. Vincent Millay had lived there.

“I suppose
you
don't know her,” she teased.

“I'm not a big reader anymore. I don't have time.” I explained that several afternoons a week I helped out at the Hart farm, and I worked all day there on Saturdays.

“I see,” she said. “You have time to read dirty parts of books, but not things like “‘O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!'”

“Hold
thee
close enough?”

“Hold thee close enough.”

“Why does she say hold
thee
close enough?”

“Not because she's one of you Quakers, if that's what you think. It's just poetic.”

She looked at her watch. “I have to go. I said I'd be home by midnight. My parents think I'm at the Sweet Creek High party.”

“In those clothes?”

“It was a masquerade,” she said. “Come as someone you admire.”

She wore the plaid mackinaw over her shoulders and under it Danny Jr.'s green-and-white letter sweater, won when he was SCHS's star quarterback. Her jeans were rolled at the cuffs, and she had on black boots.

“Then you're supposed to be Danny Jr.?”

“I'd rather go to a party as my favorite brother than be at Wride Them Cowboy. Who wants to spend New Year's Eve with your parents' friends?” Her feet were keeping time with the song on the jukebox, “Be Careful, It's My Heart.”

She suddenly sang out, “
It's not the ground you walk on, it's my heart.”

“You have a nice voice,” I said.

“Thanks to Mrs. Ochevsky, my singing teacher.”

“Why, she lives right next door to the Harts, in Doylestown.”

“Sometimes I see the horses, and I wish I could ride again. I used to ride at Luke Casper's, with Danny Jr., but I had to choose between riding lessons and voice
lessons. Mrs. Ochevsky won out. I'd like to sing with a band someday.”

“You sound swell, so you should be able to do it.”

Daria leaned down and blew away some spilled sugar. Then she stood and asked me if I was going home. We didn't live that far away from each other.

“I'm not going home yet. I'm supposed to be guarding the store.”

“I remember when I used to shop at your store, you were there sometimes. Were you working there?”

“Ever since I can remember. There was always something for me to do.”

“What needs to be done in that store is paint the walls.”

“Paint the walls?”

She nodded.

“They were just painted last spring,” I said. Marty Allen, my best friend, had helped Bud and me do the job. Tommy was always at basketball practice.

“I hate the color of the walls in your store. They remind me of upchuck. Your father should paint everything white.”

“I'll tell him.”

“I never meant to hurt your dad, Jubal.”

“But you did. I have to tell you that you did.”

“I get so angry sometimes. Not really at your dad. But at my brothers just being swooped up and sent to war,” she said.

I didn't point out that Danny Jr. hadn't been swooped
up, that he'd volunteered when he was seventeen. Dean waited until he was draft age to enlist.

If we were going to be friends, there were a lot of things I wouldn't be pointing out and vice versa.

I helped her get her arms into her coat sleeves.

There was a light snow still falling outside the diner.

“Happy 1943, Jubal.”

I wanted to say that I hoped she'd be a big part of it.

But “Yes” was all I could manage. And “Happy New Year, Daria.”