13. Home at Last

As you can see, it took me quite a while to get things arranged at the hospital in Jackson, Mississippi, before I could start on my long-desired and eagerly awaited trip home. But at last the ordeal was over and I went to the local bus station to catch the first bus they had for Alabama. I arrived at the bus station at one-thirty in the morning. I was very fortunate, I thought, in that the next bus for Alabama was scheduled to leave at two o’clock. It left at four and I was on it.

We got to Montgomery at one o’clock in the afternoon. I had been up all night and had been fighting for footing on the bus for the past twelve hours. I don’t think I was being selfish about that place to stand. I didn’t ask anyone for a seat. All I wanted was a place to stand. But on that crowded, jostling bus I would have lost even that, and would have been pushed right off the bus by some exiting passenger, if I had not fought valiantly for footing. This campaign left me not a little weary and worn. It is not hard to understand, therefore, that when I arrived in Montgomery I was in no mood for misfortune. But that is what I got. I had been told, when I had started this pilgrimage of penance, that a bus would leave Montgomery for Andalusia, Alabama (my home and destination), at two p.m. When I got off the bus at Montgomery, I made it as fast as I could to the first sitting-down place I saw. I didn’t bother to check to see if the bus to Andalusia was running on time. I was so tired and anxious to sit down that my brain wouldn’t work. I flopped into a chair and dozed. I roused up at ten minutes of two and started scrambling around for my bags. All of a sudden that joker on the loud-speaker began snarling, “The two p.m. bus for Andalusia will run at four p.m maybe.” The whole transportation system was working against me. I would never get home at this rate. I was losing time everywhere. But, you know, the human body and mind are wonderful gadgets (I never go without mine). They will worry and fret and fume and go along with you just as much as you like—up to a certain point. But when they get tired of monkey business, they compare notes and agree to call the whole thing off. That is what happened to me. Ordinarily, you would expect a fellow to get pretty sore about all these delays. Ever since I had been told back in Soissons, France, so many months before, that I was coming home, I had encountered one delay after another. Now I was only ninety miles from home, but still the delays kept occurring. This time, though, my mind refused to play along any more. So I went to sleep again.

Four o’clock came and the bus actually ran at that time. By seven o’clock that night I was getting off the bus in front of my home. And running out of the house, mid joyous shouts and laughter, was the sweetest little woman in the world: my wife. I was home.

Getting back home was one of the grandest experiences I ever had. Seeing my wife and baby again, to say nothing of my other relatives, was a joy that I shall not soon forget. Then, too, there was a little of the joy of the “conquering hero” mixed with it all.

Before I had come back to the States, I had been given the E.T.O. ribbon. This ribbon, pinned up with one or two others that I had picked up at odd places, made an impressive “fruit salad” on my heroic little chest. Now, I had always thought that I was a pretty honest sort of fellow. I mean by that that I had never believed I was one for putting on the dog and pretending to be something that I knew I wasn’t. Some people relish that sort of thing. As a matter of fact, that is what keeps the corset business thriving. But I had just never been one to go in for that sort of thing. Nevertheless, I must admit that it now gave me no little pride to walk down the streets of my home town with my overseas patches and ribbons prominently displayed on my uniform. When I was talking with an old friend, I would almost unconsciously stick out my chest, and would feel a little offended if he didn’t notice my ribbons.

Now, the truth of the matter is that I was always scared to death that someone was going to start asking questions about my overseas duty. I knew that whenever I let the conversation dwell too long on that subject, someone was bound to ask, “And how long were you over?” That was always embarrassing. What a gallant reply I had to make! “Why, I was over three months.” How do you suppose that sounded when I was talking to some man whose son had been over three years and was still over? And how do you suppose I felt when they looked at me as if I had just said, “Why, my name is Benedict Arnold, pal. What’s yours, Quisling?”

Sometimes the torture didn’t end there. These so-called friends of mine would often press on with relentless determination until I was shorn of the last thread of heroism. They would come back with: “Did you see any action?” while they eyed my ribbons suspiciously. Imagine my chagrin when I had to answer weakly, “No, I didn’t get across until the fighting was all over. The only action I saw was a tour of Europe, from England to Germany by way of Paris several times. The only time I heard a shot fired was when some of the boys negligently threw some cartridges in a fire at which I was warming myself.” That would be about all I could stand. I would sneak home and hide behind the cookstove until it was safe to come out. After a day like that it would take all my wife could do to get my morale back on an even keel.

Still, all in all I had a very good time on my thirty-day- leave from the hospital. After relaxing about a week (now, don’t get smart and ask: “Relaxing from what?”) the wife and I took a trip to Atlanta to see some friends. Then we drove down to Daytona Beach, Florida, for a few days with my wife’s parents. It was all fun, and since the relatives and close friends already knew of my “hazardous overseas duty,” I could let my hair down and talk with them the way I am talking with you now.

But the good things had to come to an end, and they did so with speed. The leave was over and I headed back to Jackson, Mississippi, to resume my residence in the hospital. Then the fun started all over again. I had no sooner unpacked my bags and stretched out on my bed when the news burst like an atomic bomb. The hospital was closing up! No more patients would be processed. (Processed is not a canning term. It is purely Army, meaning the method by which we got out of the hospital once we got in.) Slowly the full implications of that announcement sank in. All the patients would be transferred to other hospitals in the United States or its possessions. For me it meant that my campaign to get out of the hospital for good had to wait until I was admitted to some other hospital. Where would that be? No one knew. When would I be sent there? No one knew. When would we know when we would be sent there? No one knew. And that, my friends, is why we invented the term SNAFU.

I waited for three weeks for information to come through that would give me some indication as to where I would be sent and when I would be sent there. I was getting only routine treatment for my case. I spent most of my time in the manual-training shop, making toys for my two-year-old girl. The shop was well equipped with tools and materials and I enjoyed myself turning out dolls, wagons, and toys of all kinds. Thanksgiving was coming soon, so I decided to get a three-day pass to be at home with my family. This turned out to be much easier to accomplish than I had expected it to be. The hospital authorities were most co-operative. As a matter of fact, they even seemed glad to have me go away for a while. I will refrain from giving you a reason for their apparent joy to have me go home. I will trust your good judgment to assume that their delight in seeing me go was in no way a reflection on my behavior as a patient.

I left the hospital on a three-day pass on November 20. Thanksgiving in Alabama was to be on the twenty-second. I had my car with me at the hospital now, so that much time would allow me to be at home with my family through Thanksgiving Day. Needless to say, the folks at home were glad to see me again, though I did have a little trouble convincing my wife that I wasn’t A.W.O.L.

I haven’t let you in on this little secret before, but my wife was expecting a little brother for our two-year-old girl some time around the first of December. Just after we had finished eating our Thanksgiving dinner, the wife decided that she had better He down for a while. My father and I had made plans to go quail hunting, so I went in by the fire and started getting dressed for this bird hunt. I was just pulling on my boots when my wife called for me to come to her. When I came into her room, she said, “Maybe you had better take me to the hospital before you go hunting. I think Junior is coming.”

I hated to do it, but I decided to give up the hunting trip. I’m sorry now that I did, for it turned out that I would have had ample time for both the hunt and the baby. I rushed around and got the wife to the hospital at two-thirty that afternoon. She told me to sit down in the hall; when the nurses were ready to take her into the delivery room, she said, she would send for me. Twenty minutes later the nurse came out and said, “You have another girl!”

Now, wasn’t that just my luck? The baby had come so quickly that I hadn’t had a chance to get nervous. I didn’t get to pace one worried pace. I will always feel that I am a poor father because I was so calm and quiet at the baby’s birth.

That night I called the hospital at Jackson and told them what had happened. I told them I was needed pretty badly at home just then and asked for an extension of my three-day pass. The authorities at the hospital said that would be all right and instructed me to remain right where I was until they sent my orders to me. That was a mighty decent thing for them to do. I hadn’t asked for any special length of time but was reasonably sure that they would give me at least two weeks. My surprise knew no bounds when, three days later, I got a telegram from the hospital saying that I was being transferred to Oliver General Hospital, Augusta, Georgia, and that I should proceed to that place after a forty-five-day leave at home! I’ve forgiven the Army many a dirty deal for that one generous and kindly act at a time when I sorely needed it.

The rest of this chapter is for men only. The following observations are so commonplace to women as to be dull. But for us men it is a different story. So you women stop reading right now and turn this book over to Pappy. It will strike a responsive note in his heart, I know.

Men and fathers, have you ever found yourself in this predicament: your wife sick in bed, leaving you the care of two babies, one two years old, the other two weeks old? If you have, all I can say is “Welcome, Comrade. You are entitled to the highest order of fatherhood: two safety pins in your pants.”

My day began at six o’clock in the evening, when the baby was yelling for her four o’clock bottle. After that chore was ended, the rest of the family had supper—which reminds me of the other meals we had. Those were the worst meals I ever ate in my life. For breakfast we had scrambled eggs. For dinner we had soup—canned soup. For supper we had what was left over from dinner and breakfast. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was preparing the meals myself, I would have registered a complaint. Those meals did much more than the doctor’s care to get my wife out of bed. She had to get up or continue suffering from my cooking.

But as I was saying before I interrupted myself, after I had fed the baby, we ate supper. That usually took an hour or two because of the two-year-old girl, Barbara. Mealtime for a two-year-old who is just learning to use a spoon is an experience in itself. A child like that seems to think that a spoon is an instrument to be used to flip food around the room. For some reason known only to two-year-olds, a blob of eggs on the wall appeals to them. To them it is perfectly proper and in keeping with the best etiquette to smear oatmeal in your hair. And this little girl of mine kept trying to prove to herself that she could drink milk by putting the upper lip of the cup in her mouth, instead of the lower lip, as other people do. As a result of this experiment she was sitting in a pond of milk before the meal was well begun.

Somehow I got myself and Barbara fed. Then came bath time. That was when I washed the food she should have eaten out of her hair, ears and eyes, and from between her toes.

It was the time, also, when most of the water in the tub was transferred in small amounts to the bathroom floor, from which I had to mop it up. The bath went along all right until I came to the part where I was supposed to wash Barbara’s face. That started the lung exercises. I knew the neighbors must have thought I was applying thumbscrews to her, from the blood-curdling yells she emitted when I washed her face and ears.

The bath over, I dressed the two-year-old and put her to bed, and returned to the kitchen to wash the dishes that had piled up during the day. I was pretty old-maidish about my kitchen. I didn’t care how messed up it got during the day, but when I stumbled in there in the morning, with sleep still clutching at my eyes, I wanted a clean kitchen. So the dishes had to be washed, the food put away, the floor swept, the garbage taken out, and a dozen other things looked after.

When all this was over, I sat down to read the previous morning’s newspaper. But just as the chair started feeling good, a yell from the two-weeks-old baby brought me into the fight again. It was time for her ten o’clock feeding, which she should have gotten at eight o’clock. And she needed to be dried too. In getting the bottle ready I made so much noise I woke up Barbara who had been bedded down for the night. It took two or three Uncle Remus stories to get her back to sleep.

Finally all was quiet on the home front, and I returned to my paper. Just then the good wife suggested that I had better wash the diapers and other assorted clothing that had accumulated during the day, so I could hang them out early in the morning—I wouldn’t have time the next morning, she reminded me. By the time this was done, it was midnight. I went to bed. But don’t relax—/ didn’t. “Going to bed” simply meant going to another place from which to get up to tend to one or the other of our babies. At two o’clock there was another bottle. There was still another one at six in the mom- mg, and Barbara woke up while I was fixing this bottle. There was no sleep after that. And I plunged into the fray again. All day long it was diapers, bottles, bathing, meals, squalling babies, ironing, cleaning house, sweeping, and a thousand other things that the uninitiated wouldn’t understand about.

One of the more important functions involved in carrying on a home life, which we men are inclined to overlook, except at bill-paying time, is the daily visit to the local grocery store. Little as we men may think about them, the foods we find on our tables at mealtime do not originate in the ice-box hydrator or in the deep freeze unit. These are merely intermediate storage points between the grocery store and the table. I am telling you men this for your own edification. This is the voice of authority. Draw near and give an ear, young man, and I will tell you more about the mysteries of the housewife’s routine.

The day after my wife got out of bed and was able to move around the house again, our can opener disappeared. I have not to this day wrung a confession from her, but I retain a lurking suspicion that she threw the can opener away. I can’t give a motive for this, however, and that is all that keeps me from making an outright accusation. After all, we had been living out of cans for only two weeks, so she could not have had any motive for throwing away the can opener. Anyway, it disappeared and thus brought to a head a crisis I had been laboring to avoid.

Faced thus with starvation, I could sidestep the issue no longer. I was forced to go to the grocery store. However, I do not wish to describe myself as a hero. I will agree with you that the decision was one which required courage. After all, it isn’t every man who will take it upon himself to invade woman’s domain by going out on a spree of grocery buying. But I would have you understand that I did not take this bold step unassisted. The empty pantry shelves, two crying babies, and my wife’s pitifully imploring question, “Will you sit here and see our children starve?” had a great deal to do with my going.

The night before I was to go on this campaign the wife and I sat up late, taking inventory of our dwindled stock and making a list of things we needed to get our housekeeping back to the minimum standards required by civilization. As the night wore on and the list I was compiling grew longer and longer, my resistance broke down. Before I knew what had happened, I had agreed to go into that horror of horrors (for males), the dime store. That nearly proved to be my undoing.

Early next morning I started out on the expedition. My first stop was the dime store, as my wife felt that I should tackle that while my resistance was still good. William James, the great American philosopher, once said that if men were ever to cease warring with one another they would have to find a moral equivalent of war. I think he meant that we would have to find some activity that would satisfy the primitive instincts for conquest, domination, and possession; something that had the daring and adventure of war; something that allowed for a somewhat reckless flippancy in regard to personal safety. It is a deep tragedy that Dr. James died before the advent of the modern dime store. If we but had the gumption to capitalize on it, we would find here iri the unassuming guise of a dime store the moral equivalent of war. If you question this, I challenge you to enter, unassisted by a policeman, the nearest dime store just after it has advertised hairless brushes for sale. That is the situation in which I found myself.

I was inside the store and trying to get close enough to a counter to buy a spool of thread and some pink rickrack, when I heard a slight commotion and looked up just in time to see, coming down the aisle toward me, what you might call a woman—but I wouldn’t. She was the ugliest creature I had ever seen. At first I thought she had forgotten to take off her Halloween mask, but then I saw that the nose was real. She came right on, charging down the aisle without a glance to the right or to the left. People to the right of her, people to the left of her, people to the rear of her—all were knocked flat by this steam roller in woman’s dress. I quickly ducked under a counter and escaped serious injury. But when I came out, the battle was on again in full force. I was the only one who seemed to pay much attention to that truck that had just passed through. Apparently it was all part of the game.

After I had escaped with only minor injuries from the dime store, I went over to the grocery store to complete my shopping tour. My wife had instructed me to go to one of those supermarkets, as she had thought I would be able to find all I had to buy in that one store. I had agreed that it would be easier for me to get all the groceries at one store than if I had to run from one side of town to the other, buying eggs at one store, butter at another, and baby foods somewhere else. In my naive way I had assumed that if I had all the groceries cornered within the four walls of one store, their location and purchase would be a simple matter. When I walked into that store, which covered half a city block, I saw what a Herculean task I had undertaken.

There is an old riddle that goes like this: If you were told that there was a baseball somewhere on a ball field, and you were sent out there at midnight without a light to find it, how would you begin? I knew the answer to that. You would start in the center of the ball field, and going in slowly widening circles, search for the ball. I rejoiced that I knew that answer when I started looking for groceries in the supermarket. There it was before me: row after row, counter after counter, stack after stack of groceries. And I was to find a can of English peas, small, and of a certain brand. That was the first item on my list. So I went to the center of the store and started the old baseball routine.

Around and around, up and down, over and under shelves, counters, and stacks of groceries, I fought my way. It took about twenty minutes, but at last my searching eyes were rewarded: There were the English peas—on a shelf right by the door by which I had entered the store. Well, one down and only forty more to go. So back to the center of the store I went for another start. This time I was looking for peaches. I knew the avenues and short cuts a little better this time, so I made the trip in only fifteen minutes—and found the peaches on a shelf right next to where I had found the English peas. I was sure that was just an accident.

Now I had to find com . . . canned com. I started the routine again. This time the object of my search was located on a shelf right above the English peas. I almost got mad. It looked as if my system weren’t so good. I had been searching for nearly an hour and had located only three items. And they had all been right together. If everything was going to be in that comer, I might as well start there, I decided.

The next item was baby food—every kind imaginable. This time I gave up the baseball routine and started looking where I was. But, look as I would, no baby foods could be found. By the way, American babies really get their meals in compact packages. The people who put those foods on the market believe in giving the baby a complete meal in one bottle. And they get such ghastly combinations! For instance, how would you like to sit down to a little appetizer marked Liver Soup, Tomatoes, Rice Pudding, and String Beans?

After thirty minutes of searching for the baby foods, I gave up. The store manager had outsmarted me. He and his cohorts in crime, the clerks, had hidden the baby foods where even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t find them. Confessing my failure, I took out a white flag and waved it as a signal of my abject surrender. One of the clerks ran to me to receive my terms of capitulation.

I said to him, “Listen, bub, you see this list of groceries long enough to feed Sherman’s army on its way through Georgia? Well, if you want to sell that bill of goods, you had better take over right here. You locate the hidden treasure. I’ll follow along with this pushcart and collect the swag.”

And that is the way we went around and around the store. The clerk located the stuff, and I snatched cans and boxes and bags off the shelves like a cotton picker gone berserk. In no time at all my pushcart was loaded to the hilt and I was doing a victory polka on my way to the cashier.

When I got home, I stepped right into the middle of a revived Spanish Inquisition. Instead of meeting me with outstretched arms and wild rejoicing that I had come back from the grocery store unharmed and victorious, the good wife met me with a barrage of questions: “What did you pay for the peas? . . . How much did the turnips cost? . . . Surely, you didn’t have to pay for these ragged radishes?” And so it went with every item. But the worst thing was that I didn’t know the price of a single item. What a mess I had made of my shopping spree!

All right, ladies, you can quit reading now. I told you this chapter was for Pappy.