The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg

Author:Rick Bragg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

chapter four

homer’s odyssey

He lay in the freezing mud, Germans thick as blackbirds in the distant hedgerows, thousand-pound bombs falling, falling into the earth. Around him the forests splintered, towns burned, and the dead lay uncollected in the snow. Overhead, above the smoke, B-29s blacked out the moon, and artillery shells the size of garbage cans screamed across the sky. But he slept, a good soldier, hungry, dirty, too exhausted to be very much afraid, and dreamed of a blizzard of cotton, of a single, massive smokestack, of blood kin battling with tire irons and two-by-fours in the strike of ’33. Homer Barnwell might have dreamed something better, something gentler, but how do you dream of skyscrapers and swaying palms when a mill village is all you have ever known?

He could see himself there, bare feet black as tar from walking on streets of smut, peanut butter on his mouth, graham crackers in his fist. He could see his neighbors, five hundred of them, see flour-sack shirts and snuff cans and severe, ankle-length dresses, their rundown brogans and scuffed, high-top shoes shuffling toward the gate. He could see Stewart Reynolds’ pinned-up sleeve, see Pop Romine’s scandalous, undone overalls. He could see children among them, eleven years old, even younger, see fourteen-year-old Clay Hammett take up a homemade bat to smack one last raggedy baseball into the dawn, then grab a brown-paper lunch sack and fall in line.

But mostly he could see his kin, see his white-faced daddy, John, lungs ruined by the clouds of mustard gas that wafted across a WWI wasteland of dead horses and twisted wire, coughing up his life on the stoop of their company house. He could see his momma, Bertha, the angel, her limp hand in his as she led him two miles in baking heat to a swimming hole, when all she wanted after her shift was a quiet moment and a cool trickle of breeze. In the good dreams, the best ones, he could see his brothers and sisters, William, Evelyn, Carrie, Carl, Lola May, and Ethel, squirming through an endless sermon in the Pentecostal church, knowing that there was a whole wash tub full of banana puddin’ waiting for them at home. “I could see ’em,” said Homer, an old man now. “I could see ’em plain.”

He dreamed it and daydreamed it. Homesickness settled hard in that death and mud.

His sister, Lola Mae, wrote him letters, but it was his Momma’s voice in his head when he opened them, because he knew it was her thoughts. “Momma’d never been to school a day in her life, so Lola Mae wrote ’em for her…I guess they wrote me ever’ day.” It was the story of the village they wrote him, who was sick, who died, who had gone to war, who had been hurt in the machines. He read them a thousand times, folded and re-folded them until the creases, black edged from the battlefield grime on his hands, finally cut the paper in two.

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