Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Hoagy Carmichael performing Stardust to set the mood for this piece.
He was scared, Prescott Breslin was scared. Scared more than he had ever been at any time in his life over the last forty years, at any time since that 1942 night his 1st Marine Division unit, his Bravo company, stationed out in just being built Camp Pendleton, California had gotten orders to move out west the next day, west to the Jap dotted island of the World War II hard fighting west. And while that scare was prospective his current scare was real, life-threatening real. Several days before he had had pains, heart pains so severe he thought, and his wife Delores thought too, that was the end right then and there. Somehow she had gotten help, gotten help that had gotten him to Portland General Hospital, and gotten him there in time for some heart surgery to work him back to life, for now.
And that for now, and that scared about the end had driven a very private Prescott Breslin to call in his kindred (his old time Appalachia word for his family and others), his available kindred to come and, well, he might not have put it this way, comfort him (and Delores). Thus on the morning of April 16th 1983 I, Josh Breslin, his youngest son, and his only daughter, Lissette, were sitting by his home-side bed up in Olde Saco, Maine listening to him tell some stuff about his life, stuff that neither of us had ever heard much about from this hither-to-fore distant father figure.
While he was having his say he asked to have his favorite music, the music of his generation, the one that had survived (just barely) the Great Depression of the 1930s and had fought (or like Delores had anxiously awaited behind) the hard island and continent battles of World War II playing on the record player in the background.
I, mistakenly, thumbing through the dusty pile of LP records had put on Rosemary Clooney’s
Come On To My House, a song I had heard wafting through the house on the radio on the now long gone WMEX, his station of choice out of Portland in those days. He yelled, or what passed for yelling in his condition, that he did not want to hear that rock and roll stuff from the 1950s and made it very clear (as he always did on the not many occasions when he made a big deal out of his wants) that 1950, maybe 1952, was the cutoff date for the background music that he wanted played. This told me already that two things were going to happen.
One, that we were not to be entertained by any stories of his life, or of our family life after that time and, two, that he was going to continue to mourn, now apparently to the grave, that his two older sons, Lawrence James (named after his father) and Daniel Francis (named after my mother’s father) were not there at his bedside then. And the reason that those two sons, my brothers whom I too missed, were not available was that Larry was just at that moment serving yet another five to ten stretch for an armed robbery in Bar Harbor (a cheap jack gas station of all places, jesus) up at Shawshank Prison. And Danny had left home heading west (what west, and how far, he did not tell me when he left) in 1966 and had not been seen, or heard of, by the family since despite some serious efforts by Dad to find him.
See, as will become apparent as Prescott Breslin tells his story, or the parts that he wanted told, told by me his son who had made a fair living out of writing up such stories over the previous ten years or so, he was a simple man, with simple values, simple wants, and a simple code. Therefore a most complex man in our go-go times. Larry, Danny and I were his children, his kin, so right or wrong, good or bad, that was it (and Lissette too, but as he told me once many years before when we were in one of our more talkative phases, he never really did understood women, except Delores, and so by the age of puberty Lissette had kind of been a blur to him. She, on the other hand, as was evident that morning between the tears and laughter, worshipped the ground he walked on and, and while I had had my tiffs with him, who was to say she was wrong).
That they (and I) caused him more heartbreak than any simple man should have to endure did not matter, we were his kids, his boys okay, and that was that. So if you sense that Larry and Danny were in the room that April morning and if you sense that the old man just wanted to remember ahead to the early 1950s and no further before the whole thing went awry for him (and Delores) for that reason then that is just about right. And if you hear Lena Horne’ soulful, wistful long gone times past voice singing
Stormy Weather to beat away the 1940s blues night that is just about right too. Prescott Breslin expressed himself satisfied when I finally found that gem and placed it on the turntable.
I, by the way, must have eaten up about half of his record collection that day even with many replays of his very most favorite tunes (and some jointly connected with Delores youth favorites). Certainly Lena’s
Stormy Weather got several plays as did
Tangerine, a mother favorite,
Sentimental Journey, a slew of Inkspots stuff,
I’ll Get By, If I Didn’t Care, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, and
Whispering Trees, The Mills Brothers, especially
Paper Doll, another mother favorite. A couple of Andrews Sisters things for laughs and, of course their song of songs (or one of them) done by Hoagy Carmichael, I think it was his version,
Stardust.
Here though is what he had to say that morning (and after some rest, and lunch, that afternoon) as best I could take it down in my teared-up notebook:
He, at first, kept coming back coming back a few times, to his current frail heart condition and how that brush with death had triggered thoughts about the last time he knew, knew for sure, that he was scared, hard scared. In his in his laconic way he just kept saying he remembered that he was scared, scared silly, and he didn’t care who knew about it. Rugged hills and hollows born, Appalachia mountain Kentucky hard-scrabble farm born, fear hid under the rug, or somewhere else born he was still scared. He, Prescott Breslin, just weeks, maybe a couple of months if he counted it up, out of those hills and hollows, was scared because his unit, his semper fi 1st Marine Corps Division unit had just received orders to head out in the morning, head out west.
He remembered that he was sitting by himself that night before in the make-shift Quonset hut PX at a picnic table munching coffee and cakes and thinking west could only mean the Pacific islands that dotted the way to Japan. Some units had already gone out, gone out quickly all through early 1942 and as 1943 approached all hell was breaking loose with men and material heading west; just like in the old time pioneer west if he had thought about it that way then.
[Prescott Breslin, even forty years later, in relating this story to us would not give the precise day that his unit left California just in case some Nips or Chinks (Prescott’s terms) might be lurking around and could use the information in the future. He was certainly a man of his Great Depression/World War II times. JLB]
Sitting with that cup of black coffee (hell, he said, nobody back home ever had it any other way besides who had extra milk or cream left over for such fixings, and black was fine anyway) and cruller donut (he had grown to love this donut business after a lifetime of his Ma’s old patched-up bread pudding and sunken baking soda-laden cakes) he was not thinking about pioneer west stuff, or even, after he bit into the cruller, scared thoughts so much but about how life was funny. Not funny to have a laugh over but just the way the cards were dealt funny. It might have been the sugar, or it might have been the caffeine but his started to think about all the stuff that he hadn’t done, and some stuff he had done, to keep the thoughts of the days ahead in check.
First off though was his pride in being one of the best troopers in his training unit down at Parris Island, and then his assigned unit at Pendleton. It wasn’t so much that it came natural to him, although coming from the hard rock country didn’t hurt when they went out into the “boonies” on those twenty mile full-pack hikes or when he busted out number one on the rifle range with that silly M-I pop gun. It was more that, at first, guys, yankee city guys from Boston and New York, or northern farm boys anyway, laughed at him about his back mountain drawl, about his not knowing about donuts, about not knowing about how to handle a folk and spoon right and all kinds of yankee stuff that didn’t make sense to him, or them when he asked them to explain what they meant and why.
After a while, after a ton of callouses and blisters, after a ton of KP, after half a ton of pranks, and after about eight weeks of showing guys, yankee guys and farm boys, that he could be depended on if something happened to them they were practically competing to have him as their “buddy.” More than one guy said, said straight out, when they got the news of the move out that as long as Prescott Breslin was going along with them he wasn’t quite so scared. Here was the kicker though, the one that made him beam. A couple of days before they got orders they had all chipped in to by him drinks at the enlisted men’s club to show their appreciation AND a dozen donuts, assorted, the next morning. Still sitting at that piney table Prescott Breslin was scared.
While he was thinking an odd-scared thought or two somebody, a guy he didn’t recognize sitting with a nice- looking tanned Oceanside girl, at another table had gotten up to put some nickels in the jukebox and he, still thinking about life’s ups and downs, could hear the strains of
I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire and that song got him kind of choked up at first. He then laughed, not a funny laugh, as he listened to the lyrics and thought that he sure didn’t want to, and hadn’t, set the world on fire. He sure hadn’t.
Getting into the heart of the song, the lonely guy misery part, he hadn’t a girl left behind to think of him while he was away blasting Pacific islands to smithereens. Out there, out there in sunny California, he had had not too much luck finding a girl, not much luck at all really. The girls seemed too fast for him, to ready to dismiss his back mountain drawl and write him down as a damn hillbilly. One time at the Surfside Grille in Oceanside where all the guys went when they had passes he met a girl, a pretty girl who liked his looks she said, liked his black hair, and brown eyes. She nevertheless told him flat out once she found out where he was from that she would pass him by. Why? Well, she, herself was from some podunk okie town and now that she was a California girl she was thinking of becoming a blonde and had definitely shaken the dust off her of okie kind of boys. She wanted, and she said this flat out too, a movie star soldier boy like Robert Taylor. Jesus, women, California women.
[We all laughed at that one. I because two of my three wives had come from there although neither were blonde and neither had been from Podunk but had been born and bred California women. I too though could shout to the high heavens about the perfidies of California women, transplants or born and bred. Lissette’s first husband had been from there as well and he had run back there when things got tough between them and married his high school sweetheart on the rebound. So change the gender and that explained Lissette’s laugh. Dad laughed at his own story but I think I could detect just the slightest anguish as he was probably thinking about whether Danny had perhaps married a California woman and maybe had some things to say about that.]
Sure, back home, he had had a few nibbles, a couple of girls from Prestonsburg and Hazard, girls with nice looks and manners and who couldn’t complain of his drawl. But nothing serious happened, nothing serious because from about age fourteen all the girls where he came from, even Prestonsburg girls, got all moony over being married and, in order to get from under being embedded in their own large families, start families of their own. He had wanted no part of that, not at twenty, no way. But he got just a little melancholy, taking another sip of that sweet black coffee, when he thought that he might never have a chance to get married. Never have a family of his own to take care of him in his old age, if he had an old age.
[He welled up a little as he mentioned that last thought. He was probably thinking that Larry would never be a comfort to him or Delores now that he had spent a good part of his adult life behind bars and hadn’t learned to keep out of jail. And that Danny would probably never come back after all this time and that I, who had my own fair share of estrangements and non-talkative period with him (and Delores), was at best a fifty-fifty proposition. Whether he factored Lissette into his thoughts that day was another matter but probably not, she was still probably that long ago blur, that blur who worshipped him.]
Mainly though he thought that night about the things he did had done over the previous few years before he had enlisted and wished that he had had more time to do some more of them. Hell, it wasn’t nothing big, nothing to set the world on fire, but it was his life. His life, six or seven years before, once he knew the score, knew the hard-scrabble Kentuck farm score, and that if he didn’t want nothing but hard calloused hands and looking eighty at forty (like his pa and grandpa) he had better hit the highway. Since there were twelve kids at home, and only enough to feed about eight right nobody (except Ma, he later, much too much later, found out) missed him when he set out for Lexington one dark night. He got a ride from Colonel Eddie (not really a colonel but everybody with two bucks for a genuine certificate called himself that) the local long-haul driver who was always looking for company on his runs west, and knew how to keep quiet when a guy asked him to about stuff like where he was going, and why.
And he also thought about how once he got to Lexington, after a few crop-picking and dish-washing jobs to keep him alive in the city, he met up with a couple of guys, Doc and Hank, at Lucy’s Diner who wanted form a band and make some money playing what they called the coal-dust circuit. He played a fair guitar for a kid, had a decent voice that had become deeper and more tuneful as he aged, and best of all he knew all the old-timey songs that the hills and hollows folks wanted to hear. Boy, did he know them all. Stuff like
Tom Doulas, Ommie Wise, and
Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies.
[With some Inkspot tune playing softly in the background he nevertheless started to sing Hank Williams’ Cold, Cold Heart and sounded pretty damn good for a guy in his condition. You could see, see just for a moment, that Kentuck Sheik boy who had all the young girls, the young Prestonsburg and Hazard girls ordering dresses through some mail order catalogue just to be pretty on Saturday night barn dance time. And, hell, easily see how my own mother could have fallen for him, fallen hard for him, when they first met at Old Orchard’s Starlight Ballroom back in 1943 or 44.]
A couple of weeks later with some practice, a small stake, and lots of dreams, they hit the back road Saturday night places where the locals held their weekly barn dances (complete with plenty of moonshine to liven things up). Sometimes they, now known as the Kentuck Sheiks (that sheik name had been made popular a few years before and you just added your state name in front and you had a genuine band name), passed the hat, sometimes when there was no dough they just took a couple of days room and board for their troubles.
He remembered too the time that through some white lightning connections, some Moonshine Johnnie, the king of the illegal local whiskey ring, or whatever the liquid was by the time it got boiled down, packaged, and run through the hills and hollows just in front of the revenue agents, the Sheiks got to play before a crowd in his hometown of Hazard. And they were billed on flyers, handbills, and posters as the Kentuck Sheiks featuring Prescott Breslin. Moonshine Johnnie’s idea was that he would throw a free Saturday barn dance down at Farmer Ben’s, a place where locals had been having their weekly dances since, well, since there was a Hazard as far as anybody knew. Johnnie wanted to introduce those who didn’t know to his product, or who knew and had a thirst. In short to move product, be an outstanding citizen, and listen to the mountain-etched music just like any other hillbilly.
The Sheiks were to pass the hat like they had done at a hundred such gatherings and with a hometown boy on the stage they expected a little extra haul. Additionally, Johnnie, just in case the cash haul was short, threw in five jugs of his premium liquor for the boys. That addition proved to be my father’s undoing. The art of drinking hard liquor, hard still-made liquor takes some cultivation, some time to get used to it. Young men need to grow into it with age like drinking wine is for some Europeans. The night of the barn dance, that Saturday afternoon really, he had started drinking a steady stream out of the jug so that by show time his was in good form (as were Doc and Hank partners), and as far as the show went they were a great success. As far as the show part went.
But this was just flat-out the wrong night to develop his whiskey skills. Just before the dance, while the band was setting up and checking things out, Becky Price, an old Hazard sweetheart came up and started to rekindle some flame. Becky sure did look fine that night he thought with a pretty, frilly store-bought dress (really Montgomery Ward catalogue bought he found out later) and her hair done up in ribbons. She had heard he was playing that night and had gotten herself all pretty for him. They talked some then and some at intermission and agreed to meet after the dance at Lance’s Diner over on Route 5 when he was finished packing up after the show.
But that is where the liquor proved to be a demon. After the show, things packed up, he decided to take a little curse off the liquor in his system by having a couple more hits at the jug. After the second swallow he just keeled over dead drunk. When he woke up the next morning the boys were up front in their sedan, Doc driving, while he laid across the back seat as they headed for a show in Steubenville, Ohio. Poor Becky, he hoped she didn’t wait long that night.
[We laughed again although I noticed that his sweet Delores, my mother, didn’t laugh quite so heartily on this story. She had, if asked, her own stories to tell about fending off a couple of Olde Saco girlfriends who were also taken by his black hair, brown eyes and fine uniform look and who, unlike her, were willing “to do” it, if necessary to win his favor. This information only came to me much later when she was ready for me to tell her story.]
That band job lasted for about a year or so, maybe a little bit more, but then times got so bad about 1937 or 38 that three guys just couldn’t make it on bread and butter, literally. So he got off the road, headed back home, and started to work in Mr. Peabody’s coal mines (not every mine was owned by the Peabody Coal Company as he was at pains to inform his fellow platoon members when they had asked what he did in the “real world” but that is what everybody called it around home when a guy went into the mines).
Now even a hills and hollows boy who grew up in that hard –scrabble country but who grew up on a farm needed to adjust to the hard times in the mines. The early hours, the wash up time that was unpaid for adding to the long day, the damn coal dust, the noise, the deafening noise, from the machines drilling against god’s ancient rock, and the sweat, the infernal sweat even on cold days once you got down in the pits. After a couple of months he adjusted to the routine, got to know real coal-miners who were the third or fourth generation going down there, and got some respect when he told the boys that they were not getting paid nearly enough for the tough work they did for the damn Johnson Coal Company. The boys listened, and knowing Kentucky coalfields traditions, hell Harlan, bloody Harlan, was just down the road they prepared to strike one time. Somehow the company got wind of it and offered a small raise and paid wash-up time just to keep the production moving. That was enough, enough then with plenty of guys out of work, and plenty of guys, scabs, guys from the outside, with hungry mouths to feed, but still scabs, ready to cross the lines if anything happened.
There he was though stuck in the mines, the damn black-lung mines (his mother cried every time he came home at night looking, well, looking like a damn nigra, and coughing the dust out half the night) when the news of the Japs hitting Pearl came over the radio and guys, guys like him, all over the country, were lined up three, maybe more, deep, to enlist. Funny though he could, having worked his way up a little in the mines, have gotten a vital industries draft deferral and been sitting right then in the Prestonsburg hotel with some pretty town girl drinking real store-bought liquor and working up his courage to ask her up into his room. But no, on December 9, 1941 he had gone to Prestonsburg and enlisted in the Marines right on the dotted line. And he never looked back.
Scared, scared to death, or not, sitting at that wooden table having a second cruller and a third cup of mud Private First Class Prescott Breslin thought it over for a minute. He then said to himself, hell, between shoveling coal for Mr. Peabody forever and fighting the damn Japs I’ll take the Japs. And that made him just a little less scared as someone walked up and put another nickel in the jukebox to play
If I Didn’t Care.
[After relating that last pearl of wisdom, which my father had actually imparted to me a long time ago when I was about seventeen or eighteen after I had asked him about his uniform that was hanging in a back closet, he expressed a wish for a little rest before lunch. The following is what he had to say in the afternoon after lunch. Of course he was still tired, a little groggy and disoriented from the mix of medications and so he rambled more, at times a lot more, in the afternoon and went back and forth on subjects. He still though adamantly refused somewhere in that deep Breslin reservoir of hurt to go much beyond the early 1950s. And of course he, as he had done in the morning, kept asking me to put his beloved 1940s songs on the record player. I had just put Benny Goodman’s
Sing, Sing, Sing on and that triggered a story that my mother had told him when they first met at the Starlight Ballroom in Old Orchard. Like I said the afternoon just rambled on but this one will tell anybody a lot about my mother and father, their love, and why they had endured in Olde Saco, foreign territory for him, through thick and thin.]
Your mother had had just enough of Elizabeth LaCroix, Aunt Betty, and her tangled love life with your mother’s brother, Jean. [Always called in proper F-C speak, Jeanbon.] Every other week, it seemed, Betty was breaking up with him over one question. Let me give you a hint it starts with an s and ends with an x. [Lissette and my mother blushed but he just plowed ahead and after noticing their discomfort he said that he was well past having to be polite about thing now that he was facing the grim reaper (his words) one on one.]
See Betty and your mother were seniors at Olde Saco High School in 1937. Let me add that they were, and the yearbook photos don’t lie, were both dark-haired French-Canadian [F-C remember?] American beauties, dewy roses like only those with forbears from the north up in Quebec can be. So sex was naturally in the equation, in the eternal boy-girl, Betty-Jean, equation. And for your mother too, since about fourteen when she learned that she could, with just a little effort, get the guys stirring, stirring over thoughts about dewy roses and other material matters. But this is strictly, well almost strictly, a Betty-Jean story so we will leave the Delores-smitten guys to stew. [He laughed a victor’s laugh at that one.]
The friction between your mother and Betty, or rather her momentary wrath at Betty, was centered on the hard fact that in a few months the girls would be having their senior prom, always a highlight in the Olde Saco calendar year, for those who graduated and those who, for one reason or another didn’t. And, graduation or not, the next step was marriage. That was just, as I well know, the established working class and religious ethos of the town, the F-C-inspired culture, and the times. Get out of your parents’ overburdened house and into your own small cold-water flat, maybe over on Fourteenth Street by the river, and dream of your own small white picket fence future house, maybe on Atlantic Avenue toward the ocean. And that cycle, as I also found out although I could never do much about it, had been established for a long while.
It seemed that although Betty and Jean had been an “item” for only a few months that Betty had this Saturday night I am talking about had her fifteenth, no sixteenth, and never make-up with dear Jean fight. And like I said whether the year was 1037, 1537, or 1937 the issue, to put it straight now that I’ve already said it, was sex, or rather to use the latest craze saying then “doing it.” Really though, the real crux of the matter, was that she wanted to wait until that cold- water flat marriage, and not before, no way before, to give in to your uncle, one Jean Claude LeBlanc.
Needless to say All-American boy, really all All-American French-Canadian boy and former star of the Olde Saco High football team, the one that beat Auburn for the state in 1935, Jean, was all for “doing the do” right then as a test run for marriage, or so that is how he presented it to Betty that Saturday (and many a previous Saturday night) down in the dunes of Olde Saco Beach. And Jean had almost made the sale, except by the time Betty decided yes, she was so anxious and the hour was so late that she wasn’t in the mood any longer. Jesus. [More womanly blushes]
You don’t get my drift. Okay, let me go by the numbers. Boy (really man since Jean has already graduated from Olde Saco and been working as a high-grade machine mechanic at the MacAdams Textile Mill over on Main Street for a while then. That defined man in these parts) meets girl. Boy (man) takes girl here and there in his new, well fairly new, Studebaker and they cap the night off watching the fishes swim down at the close-by beach (at the secluded far end, the Squaw Rock end, known by one and all as, well just known for being secluded, okay). Girl successfully holds off boy (man). Got it. [Jesus Dad we all know about Squaw Rock and that stuff although nothing was said while he was speaking.]
But how do you think our boy Jean, champion football mover but a little bashful in the sex department when he came right down to it, tried to get one Betty La Croix in the mood. Take one guess. Backing up the ocean swells and moonlight in the mood department is one Benny Goodman and his gang on that car radio, providing that heavenly deep beat-pacing clarinet that sets those drums a rolling, those trumpets blowing to Gabriel’s heaven, and sets those sexy saxes on fire to blow the walls of Jericho down that I mentioned before. A little
Buddha Swings at the right moment will go a long way. So Benny did his part.
[After a little break to take his afternoon medication my father moved on to tell this one. I thought it sounded kind of familiar some of the details anyway. And it was, partially because it was his version of a story my mother had told to me about their courting days when she was in one of her expansive non-blaspheming Josh Breslin to hell and say seven novenas moods. The story had something, actually little, to do with my oldest brother Larry and so my father told it in such a way that even with Larry now serving his third (or was it fourth ) stretch in Shawshank you could tell that he was still the old man’s favorite. It was okay with me by then, and had been for a long time. That was just the old man and his hard and fast loyalties, likes and prejudices.]
“Lawrence Breslin get your dirty hands off that wall this minute,” yelled your mother, Mother Breslin to you then if I recall. I think you kids called her that then over some scheme you Josh had devised to show contemptuous respect or something, and it included the yelled at Larry. She was always honey to me as I never bought into that Mother thing you kept pestering me about, that sounded too much like some Ste. Brigitte’s nun thing to me. I though was only the mother-supporting father to the boy being yelled at just that minute. Just as, hell, let’s call her Delores, was getting ready for cascade rant number two aimed in Larry’s direction wafting through the air, the radio WMEX air, came the melodious voice of Bing Crosby singing in that sweet, nuanced voice of his,
Far Away Places. Our song, or one of them. Our forever memory song.
As a result, the proposed rant was halted, momentarily halted, as Delores flashed back and began to speak of the night in 1943 over at the Starlight Ballroom on East Grand in Old Orchard Beach when she, then a typist for the State Insurance Company right here in Olde Saco (and making good money for a single, no high maintenance girl) and one Marine PFC Prescott Breslin, me, stationed after serious service in the Pacific wars (Guadalcanal, etc.) at the Portsmouth Naval Base met while they were playing that song on the jukebox between sets. Sets being performed by the Be-Bop Sextet, a hot, well, be-bop band that was making a national tour to boost civilian morale while our boys were off fighting. We hit it off right away, made Far Away Places our song, and prepared for a future, a joint future, once the war was over, and we could get our dream, shared dream, little white house, with or without picket fence, maybe a dog, and definitely kids, a few although we never specified a number. [My mother silently nodded in agreement with some kind of smile on her face.] The perfect dream to chase the old Great Depression no dough blues and World War II fighting dust away, far away. And to be able to breath a decent breathe, a not from hunger breathe.
As Bing finished up your mother snapped back into the reality of the Larry hands on the wall moment, the two by four reality, of our make due, temporary veterans’ housing set up by the Olde Saco Housing Authority (at the request of and funded by the War Department) to house housing-hungry returning vets and give us a leg up that we had lived in way too long. Add on the further reality that my job at the Macadam’s Textile Mill was none too sure as there were rumors circulating around town that the mill-owners were thinking of relocating to North Carolina. And the biggest reality of all: well, Larry, Danny, Joshua, and most recently still in the cradle Lissette. And four is enough, more than enough thank you.
But as that terrific tenor of Dick Haymes started singing
Little White Lies right after Bing she fell back again to thinking about that now old dream of the little white house, with or without picket fence, a dog and a few (exactly three, thank you) that was coming just around the next corner when we first started out together . And just as I saw she was winding up to blast young Larry , his forever dirty hands, and that wall, maybe a little less furiously that she intended to before, I sensed that her thoughts had returned to her Prince Charming, me, the Starlight Ballroom 1943, and our song. Our forever memory song. She then said, “We’ll get by.” Yes, we would get by. [Plenty of sniffles and Kleenex all around.]
[I could tell my father was getting tired, he started looking a little gray around the eyes and had a drowsy look, a look of the medications wearing off. I, we, offered to leave and let him rest, and he agreed after this one last story he felt he needed to get straight on. The story about his military uniform in that old back closet that I had asked about when I was a kid getting ready for college and how he had basically dismissed me out of hand ]
Josh was a curious kid even when he was little. Not curious about everything in the world just that minute, although more than one teacher had noted on his early childhood reports cards that little characteristic, but curious about my military uniform, my faded, drab, slightly moth-eaten army dress uniform, World War II version, of course. That curiousness came not from, like the usual, some Josh daydream curiosity but the result, the this minute result, of having come across my suit in an attic closet as he was preparing to store his own not used, not much used, or merely out-of-fashion, excess clothing against time. And that time was the time of his imminent departure for State University and his first extended time away from home.
Funny Josh knew that I had been in World War II, had gotten some medals for my service as was apparent from the fruit salad on the uniform, and that I had spent a little time, he was not exactly sure on the time but his mother had told him 1950 when he asked, in the Veterans Hospital for an undisclosed ailment. But he had not heard anything beyond those bare facts from me. Never. And his mother had insistently shh-ed him away whenever he tried to bring it up.
Oh sure Josh had been sick unto death back in the 1950s when the kitchen radio, tuned into WMEX exclusively to old-time World War II parent music. I can remember the battles like they were yesterday. To the exclusion of any serious rock music of his like Elvis, Chuck, Little Richard and Jerry Lee, but that was parents just being parents and kicking up old torches. Especially when Frank Sinatra sang
I’ll Be Seeing You, or his mother would laugh whimsically when The Andrew Sisters performed
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy or The Mills Brothers would croon
Till Then. But we never discussed that war, nor was it discussed when my cronies, and fellow veterans, came over to play our weekly card games until dawn.
I guess after having spied the uniform Josh decided it was time to ask those questions, those curiosity questions. Later, he said, it would be too late, he would be too busy raising a family of his own, or he would be doing his own military service, although he hoped not on that count. It just didn’t figure into his plans, and that was that. So with a deep breathe one evening, one Friday evening after dinner, when I would not be distracted by thoughts of next day work, or Saturday night card games, his asked the big question. And I answered- “I did what a lot of guys did, not more not less, I did it the best way I could, I saw some things, some tough things, I survived and that’s all that there is to say.” And I said it in such a way that there was no torture too severe, no hole too deep, and no hell too hot to get more than that out of me.
Later that evening, still shell-shocked I guess at my response, as he prepared to go out with his boys for one last Olde Saco fling before heading to State, he could hear his mother softy sobbing while we listened on the living room phonograph to Martha Tilton warble
I’ll Walk Alone, The Ink Spots heavenly harmonize on
I’ll Get By, Doris Day songbird
Sentimental Journey, Vaughn Monroe sentimentally stir
When The Lights Go on Again, and Harry James orchestrate through
It’s Been A Long, Long Time. I hope Josh understood, understood as well as an eighteen year old boy could understand such things, that it was those songs that had gotten his mother and me through the war, and its aftermath. And that was all he had to know about the damn war. [And I did understand although not that night, or not for many nights after.]
[After that last one instead of calling it a day my father got a little morose after thinking about those songs and maybe when he thought about how he never did provide my mother with that white picket fence future house on Atlantic Avenue, never did partake of the great golden age that he had promised and could not make good on in a world that he too had no say in. He then blurted this out of the blue.]
Jesus, it had been three months since the mill closed on the first day of our lord, January 1954, as the huge black and red sign in front of the dead-ass silent mill kept screaming at us (and also to not trespass under penalty of arrest, christ,) and I still hadn’t been able to get steady work, steady work anywhere, what with every other guy looking for work too, and I didn’t even have a high school diploma to do anything but some logging work up North when they needed extra crews. I remember talking about my plight to Jack Amber, a fellow out-of-worker sitting on the counter-stool next to his from the same MacAdams Mill that had been in Olde Saco since, well, since forever. This conversation and ones like it in previous weeks between us, and between many guys on those same stools, took place, of course, at Millie’s Diner right across the street from that damn closed, dead-ass mill the place where every guy (and an occasion wife, or girlfriend waiting to pick up her guy) who worked there went for his coffee and, and whatever else got him through another mill week.
Just then I stopped talking and started just staring into space, a silence that had been recurring more frequently lately as I thought of the reality of dead-end Maine prospects and rekindled a thought that first came creeping through my brain when Jack MacAdams, the owner’s son, told me the plant was shutting down and moving south to North Carolina not far, not far at all, from my eastern Kentucky roots. Hearing the announcement there was just a second of self-doubt but now sitting on this unemployed stool thoughts started ringing incessantly in my brain.
Why the hell had I fallen for, and married, a Northern mill-town girl [my mother, the sweet, reliable Delores, nee LeBlanc, met at the Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been Marine Corps short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire just before heading back to the Pacific Japan death battles], stayed up North after the war when I knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines that I had worked in my youth, faced every kind of insult for being southern from the insular Mainiacs and had had three growing, incredibly fast growing, boys with Delores and a couple of years before his sweet daughter , Lissette . Then he was able to shrug it off but not now.
[We actually call ourselves Mainiacs with pride, we hicks, and it wasn’t really because my father was from the south that he was insulted although that made him an easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac even if he lived there one hundred years.]
The only thing that could break the cursed thoughts was some old home music that Millie, good mother Millie, the diner’s owner (and a third generation Millie and Mainiac) made sure the jukebox man inserted for “her” country boys while they had their coffee and. I reached, suddenly, into my pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the counter-side jukebox, and played
Will The Circle Be Unbroken, a song that my late, long-gone mother sang to me on her knee when I was just a ragamuffin young boy.
That got me to thinking about home, the Harlan hell home of worked-out mines, of labor struggles that were just this side of fighting the Japanese in their intensity and possibilities of getting killed, or worst grievously injured and a burden on some woe-begotten family, of barren land eroded by the deforested hills and hollows that looked, in places, like the face of the moon on a bad night. And of not enough to eat when twelve kids, a mostly absence father and a fading, fading mother needed vast quantities of food that were not on table and turnips and watery broth had to do, of not enough heat when cruel winter ran down the ravines and struck at your very bones, and of not enough dough, never enough dough to have anything but hand-me-down, and then again hand-me-downs clothes, sometimes sister girls stuff just to keep from being bare-assed.
Then I thought about the Saturday night barn dances where I cut quite a figure with the girls when I was in my teens and had gleefully graduated to only having to wear hand-me-downs. I was particularly lively (and amorous) after swilling (there is no other way to put it) some of Moonshine Johnnie’s just-brewed “white lightening.” And I heard, just like then on the jukebox, the long, lonesome fiddle playing behind some fresh-faced country girl in her best dress swaying through
Will The Circle Be Unbroken that closed most Saturday barn dances. As Millie asked me for the third time, “More coffee?” I came out of his trance. After saying no to Millie, I said no to myself with that same kind of December 1941 resolve. A peep-break Saturday night dance didn’t mean squat against that other stuff. And once again I let out my breathe and said to myself one more time- Yes, times are tough, times will still be tough, jesus, but Delores, the three boys, and I would eke it out somehow. There was no going back, no way.
Just then through the door Jim LaCroix yelled, “Hey, Prescott, the Great Northern Lumber Company just called and they want to know if you want two months’ work clearing some land up north for them. I’m going, that’s for sure.” And, hell, I was going too.
[A couple of years after that, maybe three, Larry got picked by the cops stealing some onyx rings at Sid Smith’s Jewelry Store in downtown Olde Saco. Shortly after that Danny started to wander off for days at a time with no explanation. After, well, after that the Breslin kids madness just took over.]
*********
In honor of Prescott Lee Breslin, 1917-1985, Lance Corporal, United States Marine Corps, World War II, Pacific Theater , and perhaps, other Olde Saco fathers too.
